IV ISA Forum of Sociology (February 23-28, 2021)

JS-58

Home and Violence in Immigrant Families. Comparing Imaginaries, Subjective Experiences and Social Facts across Receiving Societies

Abstract Submissions Closed

RC31 Sociology of Migration (host committee)
RC06 Family Research

Language: English

Session Type: Oral

Home, in the views of most people, stands out as a special place, ideally associated with security, protection and intimacy. Such a pervasive and stereotypical aspiration may be even stronger among migrants, in the face of xenophobic political and social environments. However, there is little new in gender-based violence as a pervasive, if little visibile – somehow privatized - development across social and ethnic groups. Violence inside immigrant households, whether along gender or generational lines, is a particularly slippery social fact. The mainstream ways of approaching it oscillate between blaming or stigmatizing accounts, and relativist views of violence as supposedly more acceptable, even inevitable, within households from particular (often essentialized) cultural backgrounds. As a result, ideological stances outnumber original empirical case studies. Our session appeals to the latter, to cast light on how the reorganization of family relationships after the “disjuncture” of migration interacts with social, economic, and structural forces that inform both the receiving and the sending contexts within which immigrants live. How do romantic imaginaries of home interact with day-to-day realities of violence immigrants face in their families over the course of migration, and across migration system? What is the role of immigrant policies, of arrival infrastructures and of local civil societies in mediating exogenous and endogenous drivers of violence within immigrant households and families?