Die Migrantin retten!?

Abstract

The contribution engages with the pivotal feminist issues of gendered violence, vulnerability, and agency and the concomitant dilemmas that emerge when addressing the problem of gendered and sexualized violence particularly in migrant and refugee communities. Drawing on a postcolonial-feminist perspective, the effort is to critically outline the mainstream construction of the other woman in discussions on migration and flight. As argued by Judith Butler, while new modes of collective agency can emerge by drawing on vulnerability as a site of political agency, it can also justify paternalistic protection reinforcing coercive processes of gender formation. It is indeed possible to simultaneously be vulnerable and have agential power.