Graduate Seminar Series 2025/26 - Session 4

Fourth Seminar 

Gendered Critiques of Immigration, Access and Precarity

March 25, 2026

The link to join the seminar will be published closer to the date.

Fuyun Wei
London School of Economics and Political Science

Toward a Postcolonial Critique of Masculinist Nationalism: Effeminacy between National Shame and Pride

Is nationalism inherently masculinist, or does it become masculinized through specific mechanisms and histories? Classic feminist critiques have shown that national projects are saturated with masculine metaphors and institutions, yet they often treat masculinity as a singular and self-evident category. This paper advances a postcolonial masculinity critique of nationalism by shifting attention from the role of women to the differentiated roles, hierarchies, and anxieties within masculinity. I argue that nationalisms become masculinized through intra-masculine othering at two scales: within the nation, where rival male types are ranked, purified, or redeemed; and globally, where colonial hierarchies sort virile and effeminate men. These dynamics create a pride–shame hinge around effeminacy: soft or androgynous masculinities are cast as national shame in moments of vulnerability, yet can be reimagined as national pride when framed as authentic, morally superior, or culturally refined manhood. I specify three mechanisms that explain how masculinization proceeds: relational boundary work, compensatory elevation, and mimicry or reversal. Drawing on the contemporary Chinese debate on male effeminacy, I show how literati refinement and soldierly vigor are alternately denounced and valorized to secure national belonging. The framework travels beyond China to other postcolonial and right-wing settings and offers a portable analytic for studying nationalism as an ongoing gendering process rather than a gender-neutral and masculinist ideology.

Mozaien Tak

SOAS, University of London

Unseen Battles of the Kashmiri Factory Woman: Gendering the Political Economy of Resistance Through Paid and Unpaid Labour in Occupied Kashmir

The ways in which women under occupation must navigate paid and unpaid work is increasingly complex and is marked by systematic processes of exploitation and dispossession. This paper traces processes of production and social reproduction in occupied Kashmir, where economic and political volatility shape gendered experiences of work. It hence poses the question; how does the occupation shape the gendered political economy of paid and unpaid-work in Kashmir? Through qualitative interviews, this paper uses empirical evidence from everyday lives of Kashmiri women to produce four key findings. First, the interrogation of linkages between localised labour regimes of occupation in Kashmir and the global processes of capitalist development allows for a conceptualisation of the ‘Masculinised Militarised Neoliberal Gender Order’ in occupied Kashmir. Second, Kashmiri women are simultaneously pushed into and expelled from labour regimes through colonial, gendered processes of production and reproduction. Third, occupation in Kashmir has restructured social production; evident in the rise of fragmented and women-headed households where women carry dual-burdens of production and reproduction while navigating occupation. Lastly, women negotiate the tensions between paid and unpaid-work by collectively ascribing to notions of being the “protectors” of their families. Therefore, not only does this paper examines how gendered processes shape everyday lives, it also visibilises how women’s navigation of paid and unpaid work constitute a resistance to occupation in Kashmir. 

Noor Tazka

University of Warwick

Beyond Boundaries: Unveiling the Intersectional Challenges of Arab Women in UK Academia

Arab women remain critically underrepresented in UK academia, where their identities intersect across gender, race, religion, and migration in ways rarely acknowledged in mainstream feminist or postcolonial scholarship. This presentation draws on my Master’s research, which reinterprets Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness through a feminist and decolonial lens to theorise the complexities of belonging, hypervisibility, and exclusion experienced by Arab women scholars.

Based on qualitative narratives with six Arab women academics, the study reveals how they encounter microaggressions, tokenism, and systemic bias while simultaneously resisting erasure through resilience and unapologetic identity assertion. Their strategies highlight that belonging is not about assimilation, but about reshaping academic structures to recognise and value multiplicity.

By bridging feminist, decolonial, and Arab diasporic perspectives, this research contributes a critical lens for rethinking inclusion in higher education. It demonstrates how Arab women’s experiences as both insiders and outsiders expose the limits of tokenistic diversity and open possibilities for reimagining academia as a more inclusive and transformative space.

Fatimazahrae Moutia

Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca

Disturbing Postcolonial Gendered Journeys: Hopeless and Dangerous Pursuits in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits

My paper aims at recuperating the voice of female illegal immigrants and questioning the male discursive forms relating to migration. To this, I shall examine the novel of immigrant Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, that came out in America in 2005 and was republished as I mentioned earlier by the Moroccan Cultural Studies Centre. This novel seeks to recoup female voices of Moroccan society and migration from oblivion and re-inscribe them in the trajectory of social and cultural history that recognizes her-story as opposed to an exclusive focus on his-story. If gender is foreclosed in the growing Moroccan Anglophone writings such as Khalid Chaouch’s Humble Odysseys and Abdellatif Akbib’s Between the Lines, Laila Lalami extends the inscription of illegal migration to include what was subject to the male politics of exclusion and invisibility. This paper shall examine Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits within a tradition of northward travel literature from Africa or the Orient to Europe. The legacy of travel, which is, as I shall argue, characterized by a visible systematic poetics and politics of invisibility and exclusion of women, is marked by a postcolonial condition which is informed by the subversion and transgression of the conventional stereotypes relating to gender roles and relations of power.

Shambhavi Mani

University of Delhi

Capability, Agency and Maternal Health: A study of National Rural Health Mission’s effectiveness in Madhya Pradesh, India