Based on a two-year ethnographic research project on the making of European
migration policy,
this article explores the ways in which gender is deeply inscribed in the
articulations, practices, and
rationalities of the new European migration regime. It focuses on the area of
“anti-trafficking” policies
at national and transnational levels, showing how and why an “anti-trafficking
dispositif ” has
been created over the last twenty years. Anti-trafficking policy, which targets
women in particular,
has become one of the main pillars of a restrictive, Europeanized migration and
border regime.
The article offers theoretical and methodological approaches to this gendering
of migration policy,
and asks what such a co-optation of feminist discourses and practices means for
reflexive feminist
cultural theory, research, and practice.