Representations of Gendered Mobility and the Tragic Border Regime in the Mediterranean

Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies (JBNES) is an English language journal for the study of the complex historical, economic, political, diplomatic, cultural and security issues that confront the region of the Balkans and the Near East. JBNES constructs an academic forum to bring together disparate scholarly perspectives and publishes research on the nation-states of the Ballkans, Central Asia, the Middle East and the Caucasus, from 1945 to the present day. The journal encourages historical research, comparative approaches, critical scholarship and a diversity of international relations, political economy and geo-political/geo-strategic views on the region.This article forms part of a special issue: Women in the Mediterranean.

Abstract:

The current media hype covering (undocumented) mobility to Europe produces powerful images. Global media, politicians, scientists, artists and activists take part in the production of the tragic border regime in the Mediterranean (Lampedusa) and the negotiation of the limits of European hospitality.

In a first step, the article envisages the social imagination and its signifying processes staging mobile people as threat, victim or hero/liberator. These figures are related to discourses of security as well as to humanitarian or critical perspectives and are part of the political economy of the migration industry. As these figures are gendered, the representation of mobile women is addressed in a second step.

Women are hardly depicted as a social threat or as political heroes/liberators. On the contrary, the entanglement of signifying processes of the social imagination brings forth the figure of mobile women as traumatized victim and/or as caring mother.