Reconceptualising female human mobility as a liberating social movement

In the last decades, we have witnessed the increasing of social movements claiming for women’s rights. Moreover, we have assisted to the proliferation of studies approached from the theoretical and methodological intersectional perspective in the field of migration and human mobility. The main aim of this paper is to establish a direct relation between female human mobility and the creation of an awareness about their process of liberation through their decision-making process to initiate an international mobility or an international career path. Thus, in this paper we would to refer to female human mobility as a social claim, which entails a fighting action against the power and oppression dichotomy present in our systems, as well as in the structures of opportunities and constrains in the home and host countries. Therefore, scholars’ responsibility is to visualize women’s agency, problematize and politicize female human mobility from the perspective of liberation from hierarchical systems, in which migrant women’s role are embedded and from which they try to dissociate them, in order to help to arise civil society, academy and policymakers’ consciousness and, thus, to support a real social change. The questions we want to answer in this paper are the following: Could be female human mobility and migration considered examples or strategical means for subversion? Could it be reconceptualized as liberating social movements? Which are the key elements to take into account? For that, we analysed and compared fifty in-depth interviews from the life-course perspective, based on a semistructured set of questions. The interviews was realised to Latin-American and European women within the migration and settlement process in Spain and Chile, whose migratory trajectories are embedded in different regimes of mobility. Findings show that migrant women’s apply different copying strategies for overcoming gender, class and race discrimination during the transit from the home to the host country, and this could be reconceptualised in the framework of non-conventional forms of women’s participation. In fact, situated and intersectional copying strategies and agency are effective key elements in the reconceptualization of the female social movements and it can be stressed the migrant women’s claim for gender equality and social justice can be reconceptualise in the light of a female activism and a liberating social movement with political implications.