Forced Migration and Gender Relations: Structure, Agency and Reflexivity among Syrian Refugees in Lebanon and Germany

This research explores the effects of forced migration on gender roles and gender relations among Syrian families displaced in Lebanon and Germany. It aims at analysing the interaction of structure, agency and reflexivity in shaping forced migration gendered outcomes. The literature about gender and forced migration has highlighted how displacement and humanitarian crises have often led to the empowerment of people. Nonetheless, agency in displacement functions within a context in which the action is structured. Given that conflict-induced forced migration entails various gender roles transformation in men and women, this research questions to what extent pre-existing gender dynamics and patterns undergo changes; what role the receiving society has in shaping those changes; and how refugees deal with gender roles transformation in terms of agency and reflexivity. Specifically, I question how structural factors as challenging living conditions, a changing legal status, a fractured relationship with the home country, and a sometimes - conflicting one with the host country, may foster or constrain gendered practices among Syrian refugees. I claim that displacement has a great impact in (re)shaping conventional ideas of gender roles, as well as in challenging traditional gender beliefs. In Lebanon and Germany displaced Syrian men and women are now renegotiating their masculinity and femininity identities within a new field. In order to enable more systematic analysis, I outline a series of gendered attitudes in displacement some of them being the rejection of traditional gender roles and the development of new gender practices; and the conservation of traditional gender roles and the refusal to adapt to new gender roles. My results indicate that despite the structures of displacement, many refugees succeed in attaining aspirations when renegotiating their gender roles in the household and in society. In particular, they succeed in mobilizing social, financial, intellectual and cultural capital by developing their own typologies of agency. In this sense, in order to understand how the interaction of agency, structure and reflexivity can inform our understanding of the dynamics on the field, I identify varieties of doing gender among refugees, including overplayed femininity, contested masculinity, suspended habitus and religious reflexivity. Primary data were collected in Lebanon and Germany between 2018 and 2019. Individual semi-structured interviews were carried out on the nature of the difficulties men and women experienced in forced migration, their own perception of those, and the coping strategies they employed to overcome those difficulties. The sample was composed of 45 nuclear, extended and single-headed households where their members had been displaced for at least one year.