by Valentina Biondini
Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2025)
Abstract:
In 2018, there was a sharp increase in displacement from Venezuela in a context of profound political and economic instability. International organizations disseminated images of people moving in extremely precarious conditions, particularly highlighting women, pregnant and carrying children, as the emblematic figures. This situation was soon labeled a “migration and humanitarian crisis”, legitimizing an unprecedented humanitarian intervention primarily funded by US government. This essay analyzes the migration and border control practices that evoke gender-based violence as a category of intervention on migration movements from Venezuela between 2018 and 2023. It draws on my ethnographic, multi-sited, and mobile fieldwork carried out between 2021 and 2023 in 24 localities and border areas of the so-called South American Western Corridor. The essay argues that gender-based violence functioned as a category of political intervention that facilitated the externalization of borders in South America through a humanitarian architecture primarily funded by the U.S. government. Within this framework, the externalization of borders operated surreptitiously, outsourced to international organizations and NGOs, and concealed under the narrative of protecting women. I contend that the gender-based violence category was not fixed but rather operated in different ways according to the security interests of the US government. Specifically, when migrant itineraries were oriented toward countries in the South American Andes, gender-based violence was invoked to facilitate and accelerate the movement of ‘women and children’. Conversely, when the United States became a desired destination for thousands of Venezuelan migrants, the gender-based violence was reframed to support deterrence strategies.
Keywords: Gender-Based Violence, externalization, border, migration, South America
About the author: Valentina Biondini is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Buenos Aires with funding from CONICET. Her dissertation research examines the gendering of the South American migration and border regime. Specifically, she critically analyzes humanitarian interventions to transit migration based on the “gender perspective,” through a multi-sited ethnography in six countries of the South American Western Corridor. Her recent and forthcoming publications analyze gender governmentality, the politicization of motherhood in migratory transits, and the configuration of the Western South American Corridor.