Beyond Western Gaze: Locating Subjectivities of Asylum-Seeking Women in the Eastern Mediterranean


Evangelia Tastsoglou, Saint Mary's University

This paper derives from an empirical study of asylum-seeking women survivors of gender-based violence arriving through the Eastern Mediterranean route to Greece in the second decade of the 21st century. Through qualitative in-depth interviews of 20 key informants and 35 women arriving from diverse African and Middle-Eastern countries, the journeys to “safety” in the EU are being focused to investigate and interrogate the ways in which the agency and resilience of these women defies stereotypical Western assumptions about gender and refugees from generalized or gender-based violence. Non-conventional narratives, with unexpected twists in harrowing journeys, camps and transit spaces or “settlement” in urban jungles are foregrounded and analyzed to reveal the humanity and subjectivities of these women who are neither passive victims nor heroic survivors, as the Western gaze portrays them. Using feminist, intersectional and de-colonial perspectives we present the GBV asylum-seeking women in Greece as human beings, sometimes fighting and resisting, but also aquiescing, negotiating, connecting with others and recruiting allies, making strategic choices under highly constraining circumstances and limited options, adapting and changing themselves in the process. Instances of racism and legal status discrimination are considered from the viewpoint, experiences and identities of women while their intersections with gender and social class are discussed.

This paper will be presented at the following session: