Paper short abstract:

This contribution examines, from a feminist perspective, the experiences of women asylum seekers, highlighting the relevance of citizen collectives and NGOs. The ethnographic focus reveals gendered challenges at humanitarian borders, based on fieldwork in Madrid (2015-2023).

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses, from a feminist anthropological perspective, the experiences that asylum-seeking women have during the moments and spaces of waiting. In the transition to protection and refuge, they experience different periods of waiting, which differ in length and risks according to contexts and circumstances. Waiting is not neutral, but is embedded in unequal and often violent gender relations for migrant and asylum-seeking women.

In this context, the role of citizens' groups and non-governmental organisations in providing assistance to asylum seekers is highlighted. Their involvement is complexly interwoven into the discourses and practices that shape humanitarian borders and the reception of refugee populations. In this way, it analyses the intersection between the actions and discourses of citizen groups, non-governmental organisations and the gender-specific challenges faced by asylum-seeking women in their search for protection and refuge.

Through fieldwork conducted in Madrid (Spain) between 2015 and 2023, we analyse how feminist ethnographic attention to waiting raises crucial questions in the context of humanitarian borders, specifically in relation to gender dynamics linked to the temporal and spatial categories experienced by women and men in situations of forced displacement and transit in the context of Spanish and European refuge.