Reimagining Refugee Women’s Agency and Authorship: Feminist Empowerment Strategies in the British Asylum Sector

The current refugee system reproduces gender hierarchies by representing women as vulnerable and helpless victims. The relevant literature (Pittaway, 2004) investigates how women need to fit into timeless categories of vulnerability and present themselves as victims to be recognized by the system. Such assumptions can be highly dangerous since they might further disempower women refugees via imposing a victimized status on them that completely disregard their agency. The more recent studies by Ulrike, 2014 and Freedman, 2017 explore ways how refugeehood can have an empowering effect on women instead: Women are constructed as rational agents who are capable of strategically using the available resources and structures for achieving their security and highlighting their agency. Building on these constructions, this paper examines how self-identified feminist refugee organizations in the UK identify and address “women’s empowerment” as providing opportunities for women to increase their public visibility, authorship and political agency (before or after securing a legal status). These tactics can be listed as the provision and use of story-telling and public speaking classes, photography projects, drama, music and poetry performances on politics, and intersectional feminism classes. Ultimately, organizations utilize these programs to decrease women’s dependence on aid and public structures in the long-run, which is in line with how they define “empowerment” as an operational goal. Developing on qualitative interpretivist epistemologies, the data is collected through semi-structured interviews with aid workers and women asylum-seekers as well as engaging in participant observation in the communities and service structures in the relevant organizations.