Integration Discourses, the Purification of Gender and Interventions in Family Migrations

Abstract

In a critique of integration, Schinkel (2018) highlights the purification of class and race which evacuates explanatory variables from studies of integration as a concept and practice. Surprisingly gendered purification is left out. This article argues that a range of gender issues presenting migrant women, especially from Muslim countries, as being deficient in modernity and contributing to poor social reproduction through their family practices and transnational ties, were at the forefront of political calls for intervention in family lives and the implementation of integration measures in the past two decades. In part this reflects an attempt to alter the class composition of family migrants and bring them closer to middle-class norms and values. Such reductionist and homogenizing representations continue despite the complexity of contemporary family migrations and practices, reinforcing the continuing purification and simplification of categories of analysis in discussions of racialized gender and classed integration in European societies.