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Document Type

Article

Abstract

As people migrate elsewhere, they create new forms of solidarity and citizenship through articulations of their Indigenous identity. The activities and identity formations of migrant Imazighen have long been integral to the Amazigh movement, often producing and propelling forward ideas and practices that influence politics in their North African homelands. At the same time, migration is a key driver of shifts in gender roles and identity. The gendered dimension of Indigenous experience remains largely underexplored and is the subject of this article. Amazigh women, like other Indigenous women around the globe, are frequently portrayed as guardians of cultural and linguistic identity, but with sparse attention to their everyday lived realities. Drawing on interviews with Amazigh women living in the United States as part of a larger study, this article explores opportunities and new spaces for Amazigh women’s agency in the diaspora, resulting from complex shifts in prevailing gender relationships and hierarchies, status and roles in the home country, and structural and ideological characteristics of the U.S. Following a brief review of the perspective of Indigenous feminism, it examines three broad themes. First, it examines how Amazigh women in the U.S. inhabit spaces between invisibility and hypervisibility. Participants reflected on gendered in/visibility in U.S. society, especially when related to their religious identity. Second, women reflected on transnational pressures and changes in how they related to immigration, marriage, religion, and social barriers to higher education. They seized upon on pan-Amazigh narratives about the prominent role of women in matriarchal societies of the past but connected these to contemporary forms of defiant femininity, disrupting and extending discourse of Amazigh womenhood. Women’s stories of immigrating to the United States alone highlight diverse family dynamics and responses. Finally, this article explores how Timazighen create new forms of community in the United States, despite challenges of isolation, dis-placement, ruptures with family, and the loss of gendered spaces.

DOI

10.5642/jas.CJFJ2794

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