Reconstructing Racialised Femininity: Stories from Venezuelan migrant women

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper critically analyses how Venezuelan migrant women negotiate, challenge and at times reproduce oppressive gender relations as they navigate their new socio-economic realities within Trinidad and Tobago. These socio-economic realities include the ways they attempt to meet their financial needs within feminised labour markets such as engaging in care and domestic work. We focus on how the pervasive constructions of their femininity, based upon the social and cultural expectations they migrated with from Venezuela, re-produce unequal power relations in their everyday lives. We also examine how the gendered stereotypes of Venezuelan migrant women within Trinidad and Tobago reflect how their racialised identities are situated as desirable and exploitable within the Trinidadian labour market. We engage in a feminist narrative analysis that employs the qualitative method of in-depth interviews to gain gendered insights from Venezuelan migrant women about their lived experiences. We share these migrant women’s stories of survival to highlight how their liminal racialised identities lead to hypervisibility and invisibility, resulting in them experiencing multiple forms of discrimination, including xenophobia and stereotyping. Yet, despite these challenges, we explore how they remain empowered to find ways to challenge stigma, discrimination and xenophobia and access necessary material resources.