1 Gender Knowledge in Economic Migration Theories and in - Garnet

husband and his family lose the money paid for the matching-agency, their reputation in the
neighbourhood and the women’s reproductive work, this threat becomes a weapon in the
women’s hands. They also use governmental integration courses to exchange Vietnamese
goods and information, even though the state tries to normalize them as good daughters-inlaw
(ibid.: 723). In their study on migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, Chang and Ling
noticed that migrant women, de-embedded from their traditional social space and gender
roles, experienced a higher degree of freedom, while at the same time being confined to their
ethnicity and genderedness. They cope with this dilemma by either adhering to conservative
norms (e.g. Catholicism) or by giving new gender roles a try (e.g. „Tom Boyism“ as a form
of homo- or bi-sexuality). Chang and Ling conclude that the coping strategy depends on
individual networks and resources. Agency is thus an arrangement with contradictory
conditions (Chang/Ling 2000).
The heterogeneous empirical evidence shows that even if established gender orders and more
traditional forms of gender knowledge are not openly challenged, incremental changes and
moving mind sets can be at work, which may end up in more gender just gender orders and
knowledges.
Conclusion
The excursion back to the origins of migration studies and the cursory view on some of the
most important disciplines in the field revealed the role gender played in the evolution of
migration studies and the different degrees of openness towards gender issues in the
respective disciplines. It can be argued that, with the exception of anthropology, until the late
20 th century, migration studies did either not deal with gender differences or explicitly negate
them. Yet, implicitly, they assumed the male migrant as the ‘normal migrant’. This finding
was supported by the more in depth analysis of the two neoclassical models of migration.
Here, explicit gender knowledge revealed that different migration patterns of men and
women are considered as a result of the assumed fundamental difference between the
genders. The models’ implicit gender knowledge, is equally biased: Women are considered as
dependents, following men or waiting for their return (the “left behind”, cf.
Toyota/Yeoh/Nguyen 2007). Women are put on the pole of tradition, while mobile men
embody modernity (Brettell 2000: 109). This thought is compatible with modernization
theory, thus not only academic disciplines such as economics, but also metaconcepts like
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