This article has two aims. Positing Ireland as a 'racial state,' it positions migrant women, who have been represented as conniving to subvert Ireland's citizenship and nationality norms, as carrying the burden of representations of strangerhood, theorised after Zygmunt Bauman and Walter Benjamin as both flâneur, or stroller, and stranger proper. My second aim is to consider the collusion by feminist researchers in such representations through our power to name, categorise, and constitute migrants as 'other,' and thus as the unproblematised objects of our orientalising gaze. Like city strollers, finding themselves among strangers and being strangers to them, social researchers often take strangers as 'surfaces,' seeing and knowing them episodically. However, this article is neither a feminist j'accuse nor a prescriptive solution to the 'problem' of researching migrant women. In this article, I do not assume 'migrant women' as a homogenising monolithic category. Rather than attempting to make their experiences visible through unreflexive conventional ethnographies, this article seeks to reproblematise representation and experience as feminist methodological tools used here to position the migrant-woman-stranger within a gendered critique of the racial state. © 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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World gender relations feminism Eurasia academic research Western Europe womens status Europe citizenship Eastern Hemisphere Ireland migration