4.4 Migration and consciousness

Population movement affects female identity and the contradictions involved in this insider/outsider issue. Female migrants move from relative sameness to relative difference; they engage in a consciousness-changing journey. Some seek out communities of sameness amid the difference. Some immerse themselves in difference until they are no longer the same, but no longer different. Even after many years some migrants are still not fully at home in the host country, but they are not at home at home; nor are they still completely a foreigner in a foreign land.

Insider/outsider questions are relevant when analysing any sort of extra-European migration (and perhaps also for certain aspects of intra-European migration.) Algerian women in France, Iranian women in Sweden, Polish and Turkish women in Germany and Albanian and Somali women in Italy all experience "Otherness" within the dominant culture. The study of women sheds considerable light upon the wider question of how migrants "fit into" the "new Europe." As Simone de Beauvoir so insightfully recognised, women in most cultures are accustomed to living as "the other" in gendered systems which give males most of the social, economic, political and sexual privileges and power. While for male migrants this experience of "otherness" in a new culture is a new experience, and can be a severely dislocating, disturbing one, there is evidence that female immigrants, having already experienced it, have less difficulty adjusting to this aspect, and are therefore more able to move towards taking advantage of employment and educational opportunities. This has been found to be the case with women refugees integrating into Dutch society, with central Asian women migrants moving into Russia, with Maghrebian women in France and Iranian women in Sweden.

However useful gendered experiences of cultural alienation may be for women settling into culturally alien landscapes, concepts such as cultural integration, assimilation, or adaptation must be approached carefully and with great consciousness. They are easily manipulated to support racist positions which deny non-White ethnic groups their right to linguistic and cultural integrity and identity. For example, the dominant stereotype of Turkish women in Germany is that they have no other wish than to be as 'free and liberated' as German women. Interviews with young Turkish women in Germany indicate a wide range of interpretations of their transcultural experiences. Some second and third generation Turkish women see their difficulties as primarily originating in familial, rather than cultural, conflicts. Problems arising from moving away from their parental home are believed by some Turkish young women to be similar to those experienced by any German adolescent. (Rodriguez, 1997).

Moreover, many migrant and immigrant women in various countries report a sense of dual nationality, or dual or even triple cultural identities. (Spear, 1997) These variable female multicultural personas interact with their families or the outside world, its agencies, jobs and social facilities, depending upon the individual's need or the persona's usefulness on any particular day. This is not to say the cultural identities or personas are false, only that they are flexible, varied and that their manifestation may be pragmatic. Studies show that slowly, but increasingly, some women migrants report a sense of a European cultural identity, although some continue to feel that "European" means northern European, and thus excludes them (Spear, 1997).