Gendered refugee bodies: bodily strategies for survival and mobility in Turkey and Lebanon

This article analyzes how gendered and queer refugee bodies navigate the intertwined dynamics of mobility, immobility, and survival in Turkey and Lebanon. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork with Syrian women and LGBTQI individuals, it shows how patriarchal, heteronormative, and increasingly hostile asylum environments shape refugees’ everyday movements, risk perceptions, and prospects for onward migration. Combining the new mobilities paradigm with feminist social reproduction theory, the article conceptualizes gendered bodily strategies as embodied tactics, such as unwanted marriage, pregnancy, sex work, and organ selling, that simultaneously enable and constrain mobility while deepening exposure to violence, illegality, and structural abandonment. These strategies reflect tactical agency under severe compulsion rather than free choice, revealing how survival labor, care obligations, and gendered threats produce dense everyday immobilities that rarely translate into durable solutions. By foregrounding how gender and sexuality shape the ethics and infrastructures of differential mobility, the article advances debates on mobility justice and demonstrates that bodily strategies are not merely consequences of displacement but central mobility practices through which refugees negotiate restrictive, masculine host-country contexts.