Negotiating intersectionality in highly educated migrant Maghrebi women’s life stories

Through acknowledging migration as an embodied and gendered phenomenon, I problematise contemporary discourse on the migration of the highly skilled. With a focus on highly educated migrant Maghrebi women’s life stories, I analyse the labour-market strategies of the women concerned and reflect these in light of macronarratives of skilled migration. I argue that the concept of intersectionality, which centres on the variety of axes of demarcation, is useful in understanding agency as conditioned by a variety of forces playing upon the individual both in enabling and in constraining ways. Paying attention to the life course via intersectionality is also helpful in understanding better the experiences of the (partially) privileged, and is necessary in order to avoid reproducing dominant representations of migrant women in positions of passivity and victimisation.