BEYOND THE AMERICAS: INEQUALITIES AND LIMITED EMPOWERMENT*

In the last several decades, scholars from different disciplines have employed a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to identify, explore and explain how gender shapes human life in all its phases. Gender is the meaning people give to the biological reality that there are two sexes. It is a human invention that organizes our behavior and thought, not as a set of static structures or roles but as an ongoing process (e.g., Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1999; Lorber, 1994; Ortner, 1996). The act of bringing gender centrally into migration studies represents an attempt to remedy many decades during which migration scholarship paid little attention to gender. The field had eschewed female migrants owing to the widely shared assumption that women (and children) migrate to accompany or to reunite with their breadwinner migrant husbands. Beginning in the 1970s, the dearth of research on women was replaced by a flurry of historical and contemporary studies that took women migrants as the primary subject of inquiry; many other studies incorporated “gender ” by inserting the variable of sex into their quantitative data collection. More recently, poststructuralist scholars have argued against comparing males versus females and their corresponding gender “roles ” for a more dynamic and fluid conceptualization of gender as relational and situational. In everyday life and even in many scholarly circles gender operates so “naturally ” that it may easily escape our awareness. To measure its effects we must first see gender operating, as this paper o