Vulnerability, Precarity and Intersectionality: A Critical Review of Three Key Concepts for Understanding Gender-Based Violence in Migration Contexts

Abstract

This chapter examines three influential concepts in feminist and gender theorising—vulnerability, precarity and intersectionality. Each illuminates aspects of the complex operation of unequal power relations that produce gender-based violence in migration. Fineman’s vulnerability theory emphasises the human condition as one of ‘universal and continuous vulnerability’ but downplays difference. Precarity theory focuses on processes which transform precariousness into socially-constructed and differentially-experienced precarity. Intersectionality recognises that different women experience gender-based disadvantage or oppression differently. This chapter argues that an expanded, critical and heuristic vulnerability approach, which integrates key insights of ‘situated intersectionality’ along with a deep understanding of structural and discursively produced forms of oppression as revealed by the precarity approach, can enrich empirical research on and interpretative analysis of GBV in contexts of migration.