Preliminary Programme

Wed 12 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 13 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Fri 14 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 15 April
    08.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00

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Wednesday 12 April 2023 11.00 - 13.00
M-2 ETH20 Intersectionality
C32
Networks: Ethnicity and Migration , Sexuality Chair: Marjolein Schepers
Organizers: - Discussant: Marlou Schrover
Betty De Hart, Julia Woesthoff : Gender and Citizenship Law in the Netherlands and (West) Germany after 1945: a Comparative Perspective on Consequences and Responses
Citizenship law has been a topic of considerable academic interest. The literature largely emphasizes the public sphere of rights and obligations of a citizen who voluntarily acquired citizenship, and citizenship is connected predominantly to issues of migration and national belonging. Gender is generally mentioned only in passing. On the other ... (Show more)
Citizenship law has been a topic of considerable academic interest. The literature largely emphasizes the public sphere of rights and obligations of a citizen who voluntarily acquired citizenship, and citizenship is connected predominantly to issues of migration and national belonging. Gender is generally mentioned only in passing. On the other hand, studies on the role of gender in citizenship law have demonstrated that citizenship for women was defined through marriage and reproduction. Citizenship included the right to have a family, a spouse, a home, and children, which, for a long time, was a male privilege. Women gave birth to members of the nation-state, but they also reproduced its ideology and the symbolic and legal borders of the collective. Controlling this reproductive function meant controlling women’s sexuality and this meant: loss of citizenship when they married a foreigner. However, the literature that addresses gender in citizenship focuses largely on political debates and tells us little about the practice: how the gendered implications of citizenship were enforced and what its family-level effects were.
This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature. Based on empirical research in government and national archives, media sources and documents from grassroots organizations, this paper focuses on how citizenship law was put into practice and the consequences of those practices, for the women and their families. It provides insights into how the women and their families were affected by the law and how they negotiated the legal landscape and the realities that it wrought. As revocation of citizenship has become a growing state practice, such historical insights are particularly relevant.
This paper is based on a collaborate and comparative project exploring the remarkable similarities in questions of gender and citizenship over the course of the twentieth century in the Netherlands and (West) Germany. Since 1953 in West Germany and 1964 in the Netherlands, women who marry a foreigner no longer automatically lose their citizenship but remain citizens of their respective native countries. However, gender equality in citizenship law was far from complete in either country and often resulted in legal uncertainty that could precipitate the couple’s move abroad. Foreign husbands had no right to establish family life in their wives’ home country and the children of these mixed couples were only eligible for their father’s citizenship as women did not gain the right to pass on their citizenship to their offspring until 1975 in Germany and 1985 in the Netherlands. Hence, the move to the husband’s country of nationality may not always have been voluntary, and once there, it may have been difficult to return. Marriages to foreign husbands continued to be seen as inherently suspicious if not outright untrustworthy and threatening the domestic and ethnic order as well as the natural gender order in which women followed their husbands and not the other way around. (Show less)

Linda Reeder : Modern Italy and the Making of the Migrant: State Surveillance, Gender, and Mobility in the 19th century
In recent years migration scholars have focused on the ways in which increased security practices shape migration regimes, yet little attention has been paid to the ways in which surveillance practices informed migration in the past. This paper explores the impact of the emergence of 19th century state surveillance strategies ... (Show more)
In recent years migration scholars have focused on the ways in which increased security practices shape migration regimes, yet little attention has been paid to the ways in which surveillance practices informed migration in the past. This paper explores the impact of the emergence of 19th century state surveillance strategies on Italian migration in the 19th c. I argue that the creation of the Italian state in 1861 accompanied new kinds of surveillance practices, including census reports, permission documents (nulla osta), residency permits, that redefined mobile bodies. These surveillance practices heightened the visibility of certain kinds of migrants, marking them as “good” or “dangerous”, while rendering other mobile bodies invisible. The (in)visibility of migrants in official records is anchored in gendered notions of citizenship and nation-formation. Drawing on consulate reports, deportation records, birth and marriage records, this paper uses the history of Italian nation-formation in the 19th century to examine how state surveillance strategies played a constitutive role in the politics of migration, and the formation of gendered migrant bodies. (Show less)



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