Gender, Place & Culture
A Journal of Feminist Geography
ISSN: 0966-369X (Print) 1360-0524 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/cgpc20
Waiting: feminist perspectives on the spacings/
timings of migrant (im)mobility
Deirdre Conlon
To cite this article: Deirdre Conlon (2011) Waiting: feminist perspectives on the
spacings/timings of migrant (im)mobility, Gender, Place & Culture, 18:3, 353-360, DOI:
10.1080/0966369X.2011.566320
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Gender, Place and Culture
Vol. 18, No. 3, June 2011, 353–360
Waiting: feminist perspectives on the spacings/timings of migrant
(im)mobility
Deirdre Conlon*
Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, W515, Emerson College, Boston, MA 02116,
USA
Waiting is a banal and ubiquitous practice that is linked in myriad ways to mobility and
(im)mobility in the contemporary era. Yet, to date, experiences of waiting have
received scant conceptual and/or research attention among scholars. Introducing a
themed section of Gender, Place and Culture, this article highlights how a focus on
temporal and spatial encounters with waiting and (im)mobility among migrants extends
established areas of interest among feminist geographers and related interdisciplinary
scholars while also augmenting scholarship in mobility studies. Key themes are
introduced. These include attention to the ways waiting is imbricated with regional and
international geopolitics and analyses of waiting as an active practice that involves
reflection, incorporation into, as well as resistance within, the everyday spaces that
migrants encounter. With an emphasis on how contributions to this themed section
speak from or to a range of feminist concerns, this introduction suggests that the
intersection of feminist perspectives and mobility studies engages valuable new
research questions and offers possibilities for crucial insights into migrant encounters
with the spacings/timings of (im)mobility.
Keywords: waiting; immobility; migrants; mobility studies; feminist geography
To wait v, fr. waitier to watch, to guard
to watch, to remain in one place in expectation of [ . . . ] to remain for a while neglected.
(Oxford English Dictionary 1989)
To wait is both ubiquitous and prosaic, perhaps so much so that, in keeping with the
OED (1989) definition above, the relations between waiting and (im)mobility have
remained neglected. As David Bissell (2007, 277) notes, ‘waiting through spaces of
mobility is an often-inevitable and frequent experience woven through the fabric of the
mobile everyday’; yet, he continues, it is ‘strangely absent from the current and
burgeoning mobilities literature’ (ibid.). This special themed section of Gender, Place and
Culture offers some redress to this absence by examining various spatial and temporal
dimensions of migrants’ encounters with waiting as a significant facet of (im)mobility.
Specifically, contributors examine some of the ways in which waiting is socially produced,
imbued with geopolitics, and also actively encountered, incorporated and resisted amidst
everyday spaces that migrants experience. Each of the authors speaks from or to feminist
perspectives; consequently, this section presents a timely intersection between feminist
ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online
q 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2011.566320
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354 D. Conlon
geography as well as related interdisciplinary scholarship and the ‘burgeoning’ work in
mobilities studies to which Bissell alludes.
This introduction outlines some of the impulses and gaps addressed by this theme
section’s focus on waiting; it also considers resonances among the articles presented here.
This section places side-by-side ongoing work from leading migration scholars – Jennifer
Hyndman and Wenona Giles, Alison Mountz, Liza Schuster and Breda Gray – in different
but often overlapping disciplines of geography and sociology. In the process, these articles
invite us to consider how different frames of reference and the distinctive research
contexts discussed in the work of these scholars complement each other. To introduce the
articles I wish to first situate them in relation to Gender, Place and Culture’s long-standing
interest in mobility as a gendered concept and a feminist concern. Following this, I give a
brief outline of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ as it relates to the articles to follow. Then,
focusing on specific themes addressed in each of the articles, I suggest just some of the
ways in which the distinct perspectives presented by individual contributors are beneficial
to developing more nuanced engagements with statis and (im)mobility, and to the work of
feminist scholarship more generally.
Gender, Place and Culture has long provided a forum for deliberating the various ways
in which mobility and gender are interwoven. Feminist geographers and related scholars
have addressed matters ranging from gender ideologies of personal mobility, travel patterns
in everyday life, and how power dynamics afford or constrain movement across a range of
geographic contexts (see, for example, Pratt and Hanson 1994; Silvey 2000; Hyndman and
De Alwis 2004; Kern 2005). Recent articles have also begun to address the ‘mobilities turn’
in social science (see Knopp 2004; Cresswell 2005), where an emphasis on mobility – as
much as place or space – is considered crucial to understanding contemporary global
societies (see Urry 2000; Cresswell 2001; 2006). The articles in this themed section
represent a further contribution to this journal’s lineage as a forum for analyses of mobility
as a gendered concept and feminist concern. With a focus on different migrant groups –
including refugees and asylum seekers – as well as on individuals who remain moored
amidst a culture of migration, contributors bring incisive feminist perspectives to bear on
what Sheller and Urry (2006) refer to as ‘the new mobilities paradigm’.
The ‘new mobilities paradigm’ signals a shift beyond simply understanding mobility
as the movement of individuals or groups among fixed points in Cartesian space, to an
approach that adopts a relational view of mobility. According to this view, while place still
matters, people, ideas and objects in motion across space and time have become
characteristic features of global society and therefore require scholarly attention in their
own right. Stated more succinctly, mobility and motility – that is to say, potential mobility
– are taken as discrete and relational units of analysis. In the context of the articles
presented here, it is important to note that proponents of this paradigm eschew a romance
with flows, networks and borderless spaces and instead call for attention to ‘the power and
politics of discourses and practices of mobility in creating both movement and statis’
(Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006, 3– 4). This themed section emphasizes intersecting
facets of this conceptual approach; namely, statis – as Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006)
describe it – which, in turn, is closely aligned with power and politics in mobility.
To be sure, there is little novelty, at least among readers of this journal, in framing statis
as ‘mobility’s twin’ (Hanson 2010, 6). Feminist scholars have long demonstrated the
complex and intimate relations between mobility and immobility with attention to these
relations ranging from individual embodiment to analyses of international geopolitics
(see for example, Massey 1993; Kaplan 1996; Hyndman 1997). Thus it is fair to say that
current understandings of mobility and immobility as ‘highly differentiated [activities]
Gender, Place and Culture 355
where many different people move in many different ways’ (Adey 2006, 86) are greatly
influenced by the work of feminist scholars. At the same time, in feminist scholarship, as in
mobility studies, there is still much work to be done in developing more considered and
multidimensional analyses of statis and/or immobility. By attending to various dimensions
of waiting, a practice often associated with immobility, the articles in this section of Gender,
Place and Culture address this dearth, forming part of a small but growing, literature
(see for example Jeffries 2008; Conlon 2010; forthcoming) that attends to (im)mobility in
comprehensive ways. The contributions to this section engage with contexts where waiting
is actively produced, embodied, experienced, politicized and resisted across a range of
migrant spaces. They invite readers to become attuned to waiting as a distinct spatial and
temporal dimension of statis for migrants, as a dynamic effect of international geopolitics
and a lived facet of social structures. In this process, each contribution alerts us to waiting as
a crucial feature of migrant (im)mobility. Each of the articles makes clear the ways in which
waiting is grounded in different places and in distinct ways. Moreover, it is also evident that
the contributors read waiting in a diversity of ways. In these ways, it becomes apparent that
the event of waiting affords considerable conceptual, social and political breadth.
Consequently, these articles go beyond simply filling a gap in the literature to offering
innovative insights and directions for future research across a range of conceptual and
material settings where feminist scholarship intersects with matters of (im)mobility.
Jennifer Hyndman and Wenona Giles focus on displaced individuals and groups
residing in refugee camps, where periods of waiting for resettlement possibilities or
conflict resolution have become more and more protracted and in 2003 extended to an
average of 17 years (UNHCR 2006). The authors detail how these circumstances give rise
to different trajectories of (im)mobility. Some individuals remain displaced but ‘in place’
in refugee camps whereas others may go ‘on the move’ attempting to seek asylum but, as
detailed in subsequent articles, frequently finding themselves (im)mobilized and excluded
from states in the global North. In highlighting divergent trajectories among those who
wait, Hyndman and Giles reject the tendency to homogenize migrant subjects and advance
a feminist geopolitical analysis of waiting and (im)mobility. Regardless of their gender,
those who wait in refugee camps in the global South are feminized, considered passive,
immobile and more likely deemed ‘authentic’ refugees. In contrast, individuals who move
are produced in accordance with masculinist assumptions; they are coded as politicized
self-serving subjects who represent a threat to security and resources in the global North.
In their analysis, Hyndman and Giles (2011, 365) question the idea that mobility is the
‘prevailing metaphysics of modern life’ and ‘contend that “place” remains central to and
salient in western notions of ordering people specifically refugees in conditions of
long-term displacement’. Their intricate analysis draws on work by Nancy Fraser, Gillian
Rose and Jasbir Puar, and places this feminist scholarship in conversation with the
‘new mobilities paradigm’.
Another facet of this article elaborates an embodied geopolitics of waiting and
(im)mobility by connecting protracted refugee situations with the politics of asylum in the
global North. Using examples from Tanzania and Canada, as well as their research with
Somalis in Kenya and Afghan refugees in Iran, Hyndman and Giles note that policies and
programs for managing protracted refugee situations in the global South keep refugees at a
distance from states in the global North. These programs converge with local, national and
regional processes in Europe, the US and Australia, which operate to externalize and exclude
asylum seekers. The articles from Alison Mountz and Liza Schuster take up these dynamics
in specific ways. The overall effect is an exclusionary agenda that turns on ‘tacit gender-
coding’, differentiates refugees who remain displaced in camps from those who are
356 D. Conlon
(im)mobilized while on the move, and, ultimately, ‘exacerbates the wait’ (Hyndman and
Giles 2011, 370).
In their articles, Alison Mountz and Liza Schuster take readers to some of the spaces in
the global North where asylum seekers ‘on the move’ are pushed to wait. Mountz’s article
draws on richly layered, politically sensitive fieldwork in order to highlight the politics of
placement and (dis)location, and of spatial and temporal ambiguity, that mark liminal
spaces where, increasingly, asylum seekers are detained and their efforts to reach
sovereign territories are hindered indefinitely. In this process, she elaborates a powerful
critical appraisal of the universalized undifferentiated rendering of the homo sacer figure
identified in Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) work. While acknowledging the conceptual
significance of this work for geographers of migration and refugee flows, Mountz critiques
Agamben’s perspectives on a number of grounds, including his inattention to specific
locations, configurations of identity and the capacity for agency. Mountz then pushes us to
consider how the conceptual tools Agamben offers are enhanced by feminist analyses.
In particular, she adopts Cindi Katz’s (2001) concept of counter-topography to chart the
thresholds of spatiality and temporality that exist between states, and to route the power
relations that link these liminal spaces locally and globally.
In the course of developing her analysis, Mountz details findings from participant
observation research on the island of Lombok off the coast of Indonesia, one of a growing
number of ‘offshore’ detention sites for asylum seekers used by states in the global North.
There, Hazara asylum seekers from Afghanistan describe wasted lives of never-ending
imprisonment. At the same time, experiences of waiting are also a time when
‘sickness, marriage, childbirth, [and] local language acquisition [are] strategies pursued to
survive’ (Mountz 2011, 390). In this way, Mountz’s article alerts us to the ambiguities of
waiting, to waiting as it is actively experienced, and to the activism that takes place in
waiting. In addition to the many contributions this article makes to understanding the
nuances of waiting, Mountz’s insistence upon viewing these liminal spaces as sites of
struggle, action and political possibility serves as a reminder that at the core of feminist
scholarship is a commitment to political and ethical work. We can anticipate that this
reminder will ricochet through the work of other feminist geographers whose research
dwells in similar spaces.
Considerations about our positioning as activists and feminists researching the
spatiality and temporality of (im)mobility, and confronting the frustrations felt by asylum
seekers who are waiting resound in Liza Schuster’s contribution. This article comes out of
Schuster’s participatory volunteer work with a locally focused collective providing
assistance to a group of Afghan asylum seekers waiting in a park in the Paris neighborhood
where the collective is based. From this vantage point, Schuster presents a forceful critique
of European Union asylum policies – specifically Dublin II regulations and the Eurodac
database system – by providing concrete examples of how this irrational system causes
‘enormous suffering and damage to those seeking protection, safety and a future in
Europe’ (Schuster 2011, 408) and makes them ever more vulnerable to removal or
deportation. Schuster explains, for the men in the park waiting revolves around their point
of entry, typically Greece, to EU states, hoped for destinations elsewhere within the EU,
and the perplexing regulatory systems that track and stall asylum seekers’ movements
between EU states. Connecting the intimate details of individual efforts to comprehend
and negotiate this state of limbo to supranational asylum policies, Schuster magnifies the
mobility of EU asylum policies alongside their (im)mobilizing effects. In a sense, then,
Schuster’s work enacts the feminist political project of counter-topography described in
Mountz’s article by exemplifying how detailed engagements with particular places that
Gender, Place and Culture 357
are then threaded together and connected to broader forces can be used to develop
sophisticated critical analyses of mobile asylum management regimes.
In addition, Schuster’s attentiveness to the effects of waiting builds upon Hyndman
and Giles’ article, and highlights the complexities of gender-coding and (im)mobility.
Schuster describes her focus on men as a matter of circumstance, related to the majority
prevalence of male asylum seekers who wait in the park. Yet the representations and
assumptions that permeate the process of providing for asylum seekers – and that lead to
this circumstance – clearly demonstrate the contradictions that inhere within the
gender-coding of asylum seekers on the move in the global North. Schuster explains that
women and minors are given priority when it comes to allocating minimal provisions –
such as shelter and food – for asylum seekers. Consequently, and in an undifferentiated
manner, male asylum seekers are viewed as less vulnerable, more self-reliant and,
consistent with Hyndman and Giles’ perspective, perhaps as more of a security threat as
well. Contrary to these representations, however, as Schuster’s work details, this situation
leads to exasperation among the men in the park who resent periods of ‘enforced idleness
. . . dependence on handouts and being grouped together with those who cannot fend for
themselves’ (Schuster 2011, 409). At the same time, these men also come to realize that
the asylum seeking process demands that they wait patiently and ‘present themselves as
passive victims, grateful for being granted whatever minimal tolerance they are shown’
(ibid., 402). Thus, asylum seekers’ encounters with waiting belie the masculinist hue with
which they are cast en route to the global North as they are re-inscribed with feminized
codings of statis and passivity. Being feminized in this way clashes in problematic ways,
not simply with dominant representations but also with personal histories, social demands
and individual desires. Perhaps in association with the contradictory gender-codings and
practices that are implicit in Schuster’s discussion, waiting has become one of the
‘weapons [used] in the battle to deter’ (ibid., 411) asylum seekers on the move.
In the final article, Breda Gray shifts our attention from the present to the past and from
the charged geopolitical forces surrounding asylum seekers and refugees to social and
subjective realms, to examine the range of ways individuals who stayed in 1950s Ireland
negotiated a cultural and economic context where motility was taken for granted. Gray
notes that as a corollary of this context, waiting was a social norm that was especially
tangible for those who did not emigrate. She picks up on issues identified by David Bissell
(2007), where he disposes of binary notions of waiting vis-à-vis productivity and instead
posits an approach to waiting as active and intentional. Taking the view that ‘time is
complex and multidimensional’, Gray (2011, 420) argues that the temporalities of waiting
must also be understood as multi-faceted. Drawing on oral histories from women and men
who remained in Ireland in the 1950s as ‘they reflect on the futures that were in the making
at [that] time from the perspective of the present’ (ibid., 422), Gray presents a potent
analysis that identifies three modes of active waiting: waiting for opportunity, waiting for
return and waiting for an absence to be filled. In each of the cases examined, Gray
considers how waiting is negotiated and incorporated into everyday lives and life projects.
Seen from this angle, waiting is not something that takes place in suspended time or
outside of ‘doing’ things, but instead as an active and intentional process, integral to
constructions of subjectivity and ‘significantly shaping the lived life’ (ibid., 421).
Even though Gray focuses on a different chronological period and a distinct social
space, readers will find affinities between this article and the settings and issues detailed by
other contributors. These include Alison Mountz’s observations about the ways in which
waiting is integrated with the life course among asylum seekers on the island of Lombok.
Also noteworthy is the recurrence of gender-coding in individuals’ appraisals of their own
358 D. Conlon
and others’ decisions to remain in place or to emigrate. Gray’s narratives reveal how
women who stayed in Ireland came to apprehend being moored as positively feminine.
They were afforded opportunities for family life and social networks. This contrasted with
interviewees’ interpretations of emigrant experiences in more masculine ways, where
independence and ‘the great time they had away . . . came at the cost of losing “Irish”
family values’ (ibid., 426). Thus, in these narratives, Gray alerts readers to an implicit
alignment of mobility as masculine and staying as feminine; such gender-coded
representations of (im)mobility are in concert with those highlighted by Hyndman and
Giles. To tease out this persistent arrangement along with its movement and affects across
scale is a project that ought to continue as part of a feminist engagement both with
geopolitics and mobility studies. Another – seemingly divergent yet equally important –
element of Gray’s analysis is that the feminization of ‘staying put’ has a positive valence
that allows women to come to terms with the place of waiting in their lives in strategic
ways. This perspective suggests ways in which waiting can be appropriated as part of a
feminist political project.
Overall, the thought-provoking analyses presented in this themed section represent a
significant development in realizing the importance of waiting in migrant (im)mobility
and toward recognizing the intersections between feminist geography, feminist
geopolitics, migration and mobility studies more generally. These contributions invite
fresh possibilities for research questions and attention that enhances our understanding of
the complexities of migrant (im)mobility. Thus we might consider how attending to
specific modes of waiting – such as those identified in Gray’s analysis – extends previous
scholarship and sheds new light on apprehending the social spaces of protracted waiting
among refugees in the global South (see for example, Stepputat 1992; Malkki 1996).
Alternatively, we could examine how asylum seekers who wait in liminal spaces in the
global North might strategically incorporate waiting into subjective understandings of
themselves and within life projects. This work might complement research with other
migrant groups including migrant domestic workers (see for example Pratt 2009). Finally,
we might also explore the generative possibilities for counter-topographies of migrant
(im)mobility and social and political activism that arise from attending to waiting as an
intentional act amidst migrant (im)mobility. On the whole, in light of the contributions
presented here, I, for one, await future scholarship on waiting with a greatly heightened
sense of anticipation.
Acknowledgements
This themed section comes to fruition thanks to the persistence, encouragement and great patience
on the part of the contributing authors, editors and reviewers. With heartfelt thanks to all those
involved along the way, especially to David Chapin, Cindi Katz and Linda Peake, for supporting my
own ideas on waiting as well as guidance at the outset of this project, and to Alison Mountz,
Sarah Mills and Deborah Dixon who helped usher the themed section to a finale.
Notes on contributor
Deirdre Conlon is scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies,
Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. Her current projects include a comparative study of
asylum advocacy and activism sectors in the US and UK and a counter-topography of the
experiences of migrant women in the Irish Republic. She has published in Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space (2010), Irish Geography (2009) and Population, Space and Place
(forthcoming). Deirdre is currently working on a co-edited collection – with Dominique Moran and
Nick Gill – examining geographies of migrant detention and incarceration.
Gender, Place and Culture 359
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ABSTRACT TRANSLATIONS
La espera: perspectivas feministas sobre los espaciamientos/las temporalidades de la
(in)movilidad de los inmigrantes
Esperar es una práctica banal y ubicua que está ligada en una mirı́ada de formas a la
movilidad y la (in)movilidad en la era contemporánea. Sin embargo, hasta la fecha, las
experiencias de la espera han recibido escasa atención conceptual y/o de investigación
entre los académicos. Presentando una sección temática de Gender, Place and Culture,
este artı́culo resalta cómo un enfoque sobre los encuentros temporales y espaciales con la
espera y la (in)movilidad entre inmigrantes extiende las áreas establecidas de interés entre
geógrafas y geógrafos feministas e investigadoras e investigadores interdisciplinarios
relacionados, a la vez que amplı́a los estudios sobre movilidad. Se presentan temas claves.
Entre ellos se encuentran la atención a las formas en que la espera está imbricada con la
geopolı́tica regional e internacional y los análisis de la espera como una práctica activa que
incluye reflexión, incorporación a los espacios cotidianos que los y las inmigrantes
encuentran, ası́ como también su resistencia dentro de éstos. Con énfasis en cómo las
contribuciones a esta sección temática hablan desde o hacia un conjunto de temas
feministas, esta introducción sugiere que la intersección entre las perspectivas feministas y
los estudios de movilidad involucra valiosas nuevas preguntas de investigación y ofrece
posibilidades para cruciales perspectivas sobre los encuentros de inmigrantes con los
espaciamientos/las temporalidades de la (in)movilidad.
Palabras claves: espera; inmovilidad; inmigrantes; estudios de movilidad; geografı́a
feminista
