Everyday agency of Ukrainian migrant women

After Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, millions of people were forced to leave the country. According to UNHCR data, 86% of the forced migrants were women and children. Ukrainian women have been in the spotlight of international media for months: pictures of mothers crossing the border, representing the victims of the war in the news, has aroused sorrow and pity in audiences. The war in Ukraine is not an isolated case, over the years forced migrant women have extensively served as figures representing victimhood and become the tangible image of violence. Moreover, as many of them are mothers escaping war with their children, motherhood plays an essential role. The maternal factor for Ukrainian women makes them even more depicted as passive victims; whom deserve to be rescued on behalf of their children (Malkki, 1996).

While these images and stories in the media are essential to inform about the brutality of war, they tend to present only one aspect of the woman's identity; the one of a victim. The “powerless victim” label has systematically been assigned to forced migrant women, overshadowing all their other identities. The problem with having a single predominant category  and narrative is that “show[ing] a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, that is what they become” (Adichie, 2009). The one thing is what Adichie would call the “single story” (2006). It takes only a single conversation with Ukrainian forced migrant women to understand that the “single story” about them is incomplete. Incomplete but not false, because they are indeed vulnerable victims fleeing a conflict, but still incomplete because the “single story” fails to take into account all the other identities they are mothers who saved their children’s and relatives’ lives, wives who lost their husbands, women who want their jobs back, migrants looking for new opportunities, and countless others.

To understand such aspects of the lives of Ukrainian forced migrant women, one must go beyond the reduction of their identity to that of a victim. Breaking the "single story" of the victim-category means showing the actual heterogeneity of the group of migrant women. This is not to deny that they are victims. Their vulnerability still stands, as does, most of all, the protection they deserve, given the atrocities they have suffered because of the war. How can we navigate these different categories and remain loyal to women's voices? I think the answer is to be found in the brilliant reflection by the feminist Cockburn:

What Cockburn suggests is that in order to challenge the "single story" of the powerless victim, we need to "ask the women in question" to show us their other identities and how they navigate these using their agency. By giving voice to the migrant women themselves, we can break the often empty-of-meaning victim category in forced migration and fill it with real stories and real voices of protagonists, which in turn can create more nuances in the narrative. Forced migrant women are often considered non-agentic, passive identities, and when, in rare situations, they are portrayed as agents, they are expected to show grand gestures of rebellion against something or someone in what are usually patriarchal or racist systems. However, migrant women's agency is also to be found in their everyday life and it can take more or less revolutionary forms according to the scope of the woman themselves, not the researcher's a priori assumptions.

Agency takes different shapes according to the context, intersectional positions, objectives, and scopes of women forced to migrate. One way to find agency is to look at the hardships experienced, and the coping strategies employed by forced migrant women in the context of displacement. On the one hand, the hardships and vulnerabilities expressed by migrant women indicate their way to find agency, vulnerability being itself a possible source of agency (Butler et al., 2016). On the other hand, coping strategies can represent the manifestation of that agency, as they are the everyday actions employed to navigate, adapt, and resist the surrounding context. The hardships and coping strategies Ukrainian women talk about can be very different, depending on their intersectional position: race, gender, motherhood, religion, and social and economic class play a fundamental role in shaping the roots and outcomes of agency.

“Ask the women in question. They will know.”

Daria arrived in Denmark almost one year ago, in early March 2022, and she lives with her son in a refugee shelter in Copenhagen. Daria describes the war as an awakening moment that made her realise what is really important to her. She talks about her life before the experience of forced migration as a lost wandering and about the displacement as a way to reorient her life. Talking about her everyday life in the refugee house and her plans for the future, Daria says she only wants to focus on her son and base her decisions on him. Many Ukrainian migrant women like Daria endure the experience of forced migration through their motherhood. Some of them speak of an interdependent sense of the self; a sense of the self that includes both the individual and close others in choices, and often translates into giving high priority to the family. Understanding the interdependent sense of the self allows us to find the agency of these migrant mothers, who may neglect some of their individual needs in order to satisfy a broader understanding of their lives. This means manifesting their agency through often overlooked actions in their everyday life, directed to their family's well-being.

Talking to other Ukrainian forced migrant women, I heard stories about rejecting jobs in order to be present for their children, having to accept jobs to provide money for the family and thus not being present for their children, or being willing to accept family situations that limit their freedom for the sake of their children's well-being. Such choices should not be dismissed and disregarded as acts of submission to oppressive patriarchal rules or to the limitations of their role as mothers. They should be regarded as free choices dictated by the individual's understanding of the world that guides their actions. The willingness to prioritise their children has to be recognised as agency, even if the researcher would understand the outcome as reinforcing patriarchal discourses. Being a stay-at-home mum, being the primary caretaker in the family, and rejecting the possibility of working - where work is seen as liberation from an oppressive destiny - are invisible efforts that are often overlooked when talking about agency. However, they are actually misunderstood manifestations of a different kind of agency. This maternal-driven, interdependent agency may seem weaker and less revolutionary than an individual-driven agency, but it also requires action and determination. Agency does not always mean rebellion or disruption, but it can aim at recreating the family’s quotidian normality that the experience of displacement disrupted. It is by listening carefully to the stories of migrant women that these different types of agency become visible; a listening process that should be as free as possible from assumptions and expectations.

It is essential to contextualise agency, as it depends on the intersectional position of the migrant woman and the surrounding context. Different intersectional positions determine different access to privilege and therefore different means to employ personal agency. In the same way, depending on the context a person is part of, certain identities will be preferred over others. Without ever doubting the authenticity of Daria's identity re-discovery - the one she chooses to focus on - it is important to note that this happens in a context where the maternal part of her identity is widely recognised by the category she belongs to at the moment, and that she is in a privileged position of being able to prioritise her family, rejecting jobs, for example. The new emphasis on Daria’s maternal identity can be seen both as an internal and external process resulting from two forces pointing in the same direction.

If agency is used in some cases to reinforce the maternal identity, in others it is used to reaffirm class identity, or to create and show new and unknown identities. Daria's story showed how her migratory experience brought her closer to her maternal identity, however, it is essential to remember that this is not the experience for all the women who migrate, even if they are mothers. And it should not be an a priori assumption. Motherhood should not be idealised and romanticized, as mothers are not bearers of maternal identities only, and they are not interdependent actors employing their agency within their family only. Valuing migrant women's experiences of displacement based on only their maternal role may lead to the romanticisation of the maternal experience, and therefore to separation between who is a respectable and loving mother, and who is not (Ahmed, 2007).

Annika lives in the same refugee house as Daria, but Annika is instead living an "internal and external battle", she says. When talking to the other mothers, she feels she is not enough of a mother, as she knows she is prioritising her career, declining jobs that do not match her professional skills but that would definitely help her family financially. These decisions are manifestations of Annika's agency. Agency may bring up different parts of a woman's identity according to their intersectional position and surrounding context. In some cases, employing a particular kind of agency allows migrant mothers to disclose parts of their identity that do not coincide with the social discourse they are surrounded by and the legal categories enforced from above. Hence, the "internal and external battle" Annika speaks of. The celebration of forms of interdependent agency only, in the name of their roles as mothers, with the romanticisation of motherhood as a source of unconditional love for others (Ahmed, 2014), adds another layer to the victim category and erases once again the heterogeneity of the group of women. Not only do they need to be saved because they are victims, but also because they are mothers, cancelling all their other identities (Ball, 2014).

Recognising migrant women as agents gives them the power to challenge fixed categories and stereotypes. Through their agency, they let us know what they want to be, do or become in the specific context of displacement. And they do not always succeed, because privilege plays its part. Depending on their intersectional positions and structural constraints, migrant women claim their identities: the mother, the professional, the class identity, or an as yet unknown identity. Capturing the agency of migrant mothers challenges the categorisation of them as only victims, as it shows how forced migrant women are also active agents.