IL genere, la storia e I refugee studies

Résumé 0

In her 1999 work entitled Engendering forced migration. Theory and practice anthropologist Doreen Indra reflected on the relevance of the category of gender in refugee studies pointing to the potentials that had already emerged through the scholarship and those that still remained to be explored. This article looks at Indra’s ideas and especially at the scholarship from the English speaking world. It aims to: trace the role played by a gender approach in re/defining refugee studies; determine the place occupied by historical scholarship in this process of re/defining; attempt to understand – by looking specifically at the period following the second world war – whether and to what extent gender became one of the analytical categories in the recently emerged field of refugee history. In pursuing these aims the article shows how an approach adopting the perspective of gender contributed significantly to opening several avenues of enquiry within the field of refugee studies, especially when the work on refugees crossed paths with scholarship that focused specifically on the experiences of men and women. In the more specific area of historical research, the perspective of gender helped greatly to reconstruct the lives of displaced persons in Europe’s post-war camps, especially when attention was given to Jewish women refugees and when the research became interested in aspects of gender connected to the Shoah and its memory. Altogether gender has been very important in showing how complex the category of “refugee” is, in questioning a scholarship that is limited to a mere study of institutions, and in encouraging a bottom up approach that saw refugees as actors and agents. And yet in spite of this, it appears that a gender based perspective is struggling to receive due recognition and that it may end up disappearing entirely from the great historical syntheses of refugees and in works on methodology. Questioning the legitimacy of the “tendency to talk in genderless, universal terms” remains a crucial challenge if gender is to become an essential component of refugee history at the very time it is being redefined.