This book follows the stories of forcefully displaced women and raises the question of whether we can still use the figuration of the nomadic subject in feminist theories and politics. This question is examined in the light of the ongoing global crises of mobility and severe border practices. In recounting their stories migrant and refugee women appear in the world as ‘who they are’ — unique and unrepeatable human beings —and not as ‘what they are’ —objectified ‘refugees’, ‘victims’ or ‘stateless subjects’.
Women’s stories leave traces of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes, defend their choice of civil and patriarchal disobedience, grasp their passage, claim their right to have rights and affirm their determination for new beginnings. What emerges from the encounter between theoretical abstractions and women’s lived experiences is the need to decolonize feminist theories and make cartographies of mobility assemblages, wherein nomadism is a component of entangled relations and not a category or a figuration of a subject position.
What riches lie within Maria Tamboukou’s wonderful Sewing, Writing and Fighting. She provides an analytically outstanding feminist genealogy of the submerged histories of some fascinating women, who were socialist revolutionaries, unionised workers, militant feminists, thinkers and writers as well as seamstresses, and in a way that is both engaging and thought-provoking.
— Liz Stanley, Professor of Sociology, University of Edinburgh
The author draws on cutting edge theoretical approaches and insights in memory studies, neo-materialism and discourse analysis, particularly looking at entanglements and intra-actions between places, bodies and objects. The book addresses a significant gap in the literature by focusing on the memory of work from a gendered perspective.
Martyn Walker, History of Education, May 2018
