Lesson 4.1: Anti-Gender Politics and Displacement

3. Border Violence: Camps, Illegal Pushbacks, Structural Racism

As the RESIST Exile Report (p.5) notes, “anti-gender’ experiences continue

through complex migration processes, illegal pushbacks, and poor conditions in refugee camps, along with everyday and structural racism in host countries.

In other words, migration regimes not only extend ‘anti-gender’ violence across borders; by creating and militarising borders, they enact ‘anti-gender’ violence on people crossing them.

Some participants travelled via fellowships or visas; others were forced to use dangerous and criminalised routes. These journeys exposed many to risks to their lives, assault, detention, and systematic humiliation. Meral, a Kurdish activist, described reception centres as degrading:

In the arrival camps, they humiliate you so much […] you feel like a bug. (Exile Report, p. 9)

Requests for protection were often met with apathy.