Paper short abstract:

This paper gives insight into municipal reception camp polices and daily struggles of female refugees. It outlines the diametrical development between the policy discourse on the matter of gendered refugee admission and its implementation at the example of struggles along an women only shelter.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on my current ethnographic field work on gendered refugee accommodation policies and local practices as well as the agencies of supporters and refugees. It aims to highlight the simultaneity of a humanitarian discourse of refugee women which gets an extremely high level of attention and support on a medial and political level while getting completely demolished in a municipality administrative process which - in the end - results in a prison like facility for women in Lower Saxony.

Therefore the perspectives, motives and agencies of the women themselves and the locally involved politicians, administration, full-time and voluntary supporters will be examined and analyzed by an intersectional approach. The aim is to outline how different power relationships are extremely entangled and at the same time are instantly shifting and questioned in the daily life and struggles of female asylum-seekers living in temporary dwellings.

Humanitarian arguments of care and protection are being widely used and incorporated in the field of refugee accommodation and therefore play an interesting role in this highly dynamic nexus of gender and refugee politics on municipal ground. This line of argument of "vulnerability" and "protection" is being played out by many actors: Even in the highly restrictive administration's arguments, it is inflicting a structural framework which comes close to an imprisoning of refugee women.

Focusing on these inconsistencies which pairs up at the site of refugee accommodation, the paper is asking for the dynamics in which "vulnerable subjects" are constructed and produced and how this process is challenged.