“We are Forgotten”: Forced Migration, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence, and Coronavirus Disease-2019

Adopting a structural violence approach, this article explores, with survivors and practitioners, how early coronavirus disease-2019 pandemic conditions affected forced migrant sexual and gender-based violence survivors’ lives. Introducing a new analytical framework combining violent abandonment, slow violence, and violent uncertainty, we show how interacting forms of structural violence exacerbated by pandemic conditions intensified existing inequalities. Abandonment of survivors by the state increased precarity, making everyday survival more difficult, and intensified prepandemic slow violence, while increased uncertainty heightened survivors’ psychological distress. Structural violence experienced during the pandemic can be conceptualized as part of the continuum of violence against forced migrants, which generates gendered harm.

Disputed Conceptions of Motherhood

This article examines feminist efforts to disentangle womanhood, biological motherhood, and social motherhood in order to promote equality in the law. It argues that this approach has produced important feminist influence and results in some areas of law but has led to a lack of feminist influence in areas where biological and social motherhood overlap, such as parental rights, reproductive technology, and surrogacy. Just as the law needed a theoretical boost that went beyond gender neutrality to see the gendered harm of sexual harassment at work, it needs a feminist account of pregnancy and birth that recognizes that these biological processes have social, relational dimensions.

The Three Harms of Gendered Technology

Marginalised groups experience both immediate and long-term detriment as a result of innovations in information systems. This paper explores three facets of technologically related gendered harm: physical, institutional, and psychological. These harms will be demonstrated by case studies. Firstly, technology can cause physical harm by denying women their bodily autonomy, demonstrated by the public availability of AI software that generates nude pictures of women, and smart home devices used in instances of domestic abuse. Secondly, technology can deny women institutional access, as increasingly widespread algorithms are shown to underperform on marginalised groups. Thirdly, anthropomorphised technology reflects and entrenches harmful stereotypes of women’s submissiveness, causing psychological harm. Reducing harm must go beyond ensuring a diversity of representation in STEM fields. We conclude that effective regulation should focus on the design features in technological innovations.

Gendered State Assemblages and Temporary Labor Migration

This chapter draws on “assemblage thinking” to understand how the gendered state relates in seemingly contradictory ways to its citizens going overseas as temporary labor migrants. Using Sri Lanka as an illustrative case, the chapter presents the argument that there are three distinct but interrelated gendered state assemblages: regulatory gendered state assemblages, protective gendered state assemblages, and brokerage gendered state assemblages. Thus, migration flows are sustained while acknowledging and attempting to address gendered harm. The particular configuration of power relations within the constitutive elements of the assemblage helps to produce the gendered state, which, in turn, produces and reproduces gender.