Women’s equality in Northern Ireland’s transition: intersectionality in theory and place

Women are invisible in mainstream analyses of the Northern Irish conflict. The prodigious literature is uninformed by gender analysis. These absences have discursive and material implications for tackling women’s inequality in a society in transition from armed conflict. Feminist intersectional theory counters and complicates essentialist constructions of identity. It aids understanding of the Northern Irish context by bringing into view issues of gender, sect and class. The tentative intersectional theoretical framework developed in this article is tested in an empirical study of women’s poverty. This supports the argument that intersectional analysis is required if the policy approach to women’s equality in Northern Ireland is to benefit the most marginalised women and thereby improve the prospects of building a more stable and peaceable society.     

Conditions of cultural citizenship: intersections of gender,race and age in public debates on family migration

This article analyses problem framings in public debates on family migration in Finland. The study focuses on the less-examined category of age and how it intersects with gender, race and religion. We examine the discursive context within which parliamentarians and the media negotiate questions of migration policies, belonging and citizenship. Our analysis identifies problem framings by combining frame analysis with the ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ approach, which understands policies as problematizations. We found that the debates held up the rather common notion of vulnerable women and children as groups that tighter family migration policies protect. The debates excluded certain racialized migrant families from cultural citizenship. Simultaneously, however, the public debate ‘whitewashed’ other families to make them suitable for inclusion. Here, the right to care for elderly family members played a central part in negotiations over cultural citizenship.