An intersectional theoretical framework for exploring racialized older immigrant women’s subjectivities

Abstract

Summary Today, racialized older women’s international migration is increasingly accelerated, cyclical and transnational, illustrating the transcendence of lives across time and space. At the same time, immigration regimes regulate and restrict these seemingly unfettered mobilities using neoliberal, gendered and ageist policies that favor (younger) skilled immigration. This article addresses the question of how social work can use intersectionality perspectives to theorize racialized older immigrant women’s lives which are stretched across multiple time(s) and space(s) yet confined within highly regulated multi-tiered immigration systems. Findings This article outlines a theoretical framework grounded specifically within intersectional feminist, post-structural, and transnational aging perspectives. The framework embraces the temporality, spatiality, and transnationality of gendered, aging and migrant lives and reconsiders their agency as a performed subjectivity bound by multiple forces of institutionalized regimes. Applications This theoretical framework moves social work inquiry to a richer understanding of the migratory realities of diverse aging lives that are simultaneously in-motion and regulated within structural constraints.