Gendered constructions of migration in Europe: An intersectional analysis of inclusionary and exclusionary discourses on social media platforms

This article explores intersectional discourses of migration and gender in the social media environments of three different European countries – Belgium, Greece, and Italy. Through a discursive analysis, we identify (1) an inclusionary discourse providing constructions of gender that welcome migrants in European societies, articulated around the nodal points of empathy and care, visibility, equality and the acknowledgement of societal relevance, and (2) an exclusionary discourse providing constructions of gender that prohibit the inclusion of migrants in European societies, articulated through the nodal points of threat, burden, radical difference and irrelevance or invisibility. For the analysis, we retrieved a dataset of 1000 posts per country about migration from Facebook and Twitter (now X) and we selected posts with a gender dimension. The article shows how the discursive struggle over migration and gender takes shape across inclusionary and exclusionary discourses that relate to the left/right-wing political spectrum in Europe.