Women, Borders and Autonomy: Introducing Camille Schmoll’s Book “The Wretched of the Sea” to the Greek Public

The title of Camille Schmoll’s book is a direct reference to Franz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre. The reference to Fanon’s book, and specifically to the dual theme of the “violence of colonialism” and the “need for resistance” to it, shapes the central concern of Camille Schmoll’s book:

How does violence set migration in motion and make the journey more difficult along the way, and through what mechanisms of resistance do women on the move manage it? How do violence and fear on land and at sea shape the experience of the border and subsequently prolong it across the European continent?

The book ¹ is based on long-term research that began in the early 2000s in the geographical space of southern and northern Mediterranean. The author approaches this space methodologically through a “mobile ethnography” (ethnographie mobile), which includes in-depth interviews with women from East and West Africa and the Maghreb who have crossed the Mediterranean, experienced multiple forms of violence and survived —at the beginning of their journey, along the way, and upon arrival.

The book traces the genealogy of this “state of emergency” in Southern Europe. In this context, there is a generalised political and economic investment in detention spaces outside the urban fabric (camps and mega-detention centres), which are often transformed into traps, into ideal places for capture, sorting, and blocking of unwanted flows. In what follows, we focus on three themes from the book, namely Borders and their multiplication; Feminist perspectives and the “feminisation of the gaze”; and Autonomy in tension.

Borders and their multiplication

The debate on borders has a long history and has been developed in multiple ways across a range of academic fields, including human geography. In the recent “encounter” between earlier approaches and migration research, as well as in Camille Schmoll’s research, particular emphasis is placed on the idea that borders extend far beyond a line on a map, into entire border zones that constitute dynamic sites of ideological, cultural, and material conflict³. These zones delimit the mobility of “others” at different scales, from the body to global space, while at the same time enclosing a “we” that is understood to be characterised by multiple levels of homogeneity. From this perspective, they constitute dynamic sites of socio-spatial and symbolic constraints that are connected, at least in part, to perceptions of gender and gendered practices.

This regime is multifaceted and shifting; it creates new spatialities through the establishment of camps, the externalisation of European borders to third countries characterised as “safe”, as well as the creation of “return hubs” in neighbouring countries outside the EU. Since the 2010s, we can observe an acceleration in the construction of the Euro-Mediterranean space as a border zone. The book examines how women live and survive at, or in, the border. And to what extent is this life determined by the violence of European policies. The author’s extensive fieldwork demonstrates that “life at or in the border” encompasses mobility but also immobility; redefinition of goals and short-term arrangements that become prolonged; prolongation of a condition of uncertainty and insecurity that persists between a condition of “illegality” and the violence of the legal regime. Under this regime, migrant women may be classified as deportable, non-deportable, awaiting a decision, asylum seekers, subject to the provisions of “Dublin”, refugees, or something else. Thus, the experience of the border and of crossing it is not limited to a moment, but includes a long, sometimes endless, process of crossing—a liminal condition between two positions: neither truly “from here” nor entirely “from somewhere else.”

Feminist perspectives and the “feminisation of the gaze”

Camille Schmoll proposes the “feminisation of the gaze” (féminiser le regard) in the study of mobility in migration and in science more generally. This involves a change in the approach to migratory flows, with the aim of highlighting and recognising the presence and role(s) of women. It challenges the universal masculine subject and inscribes gender as a central dimension in migration processes. This proposal forms part of, and enriches, a history of feminist research on women’s migration across various academic fields—including human geography— for at least four decades. Feminist research initially focused on quantitative investigations to demonstrate that “yet they move”⁴, even alone, that is, without accompanying a man. It soon, however, moved towards more complex approaches, through the social construction of gender in its various forms, in the place of origin, along increasingly difficult routes, and at the (desired) place of settlement. Gradually, this body of work incorporated approaches connecting gender with sexuality, and more rarely with other axes of oppression, while emphasising the performativity of gender and the potentially fluid construction of femininities and masculinities during the migration process.

Feminist research, in its different forms, contributed to establishing as scientifically “legitimate” methodological approaches based on qualitative inquiry, such as in-depth interviews, life histories, focus groups, thick or participant observation, and so on. Such research tools, in the field of migration as well as more broadly, gave voice to women themselves as subjects of migration, but also as political subjects of their own histories.

Feminist research brought to light the importance, in migrant women’s experiences, of the politics of intimacy, of the role of emotions and the body, of other scales and other everyday processes that had usually remained in the dark.

Autonomy in tension

Camille Schmoll belongs among migration theorists who highlight the migrant woman or man as an acting subject. The concept of the acting subject is not merely related to the notion of resistance. Above all, it gives meaning to the migratory trajectory (parcours migratoire) that migrants follow in a context of structural constraints imposed upon them and the choices that emerge along the way. This is a reading of migration which can be traced historically in population movements and gives primacy to the migrant subject. Autonomy, in this line of understanding, is not a property possessed by a subject; it is produced through social structures, interactions, and practices; and it is embedded in a framework of power relations that shape the migration process. Here lies also the importance of micro-geographies and of being situated in spaces and places in which migrant subjectivities are redefined. The book proposes the concept of “autonomy in tension” (autonomie en tension), which emerges under particular conditions and remains at stake throughout migratory trajectories. It is constituted as relative or contingent and recognises that subjectivities are shaped by desires, emotions, passions, and attachments within the new conditions created by mobility.

Camille Schmoll’s book constitutes an important addition to the literature on migration, on the geographies of migration, on women’s migration, on the concept of the border, on the Mediterranean and the significance that its crossing has acquired in the movements of migrant and refugee women and men. It opens an interesting debate both for specialists on migration issues—the migratologu.e.s, as she herself calls them—and for readers who adopt a critical perspective towards the inequalities embedded in mobility from the Global South to the Global North. The book has received the recognition it deserves, having already been translated into English and Italian, while in France it has been presented to the wider public on many different occasions.

Link to the Greek edition:

Schmoll, C. (2026). Οι κολασμένες της θάλασσας. Γυναίκες και σύνορα στη Μεσόγειο. Αθήνα: Τόπος. Πρόλογος – επιστημονική επιμέλεια: Ντ. Βαΐου, Ι. Πολύζου. Εκδόσεις Τόπος. https://www.toposbooks.gr/contents/books_details.php?nid=1093

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Footnotes:

1. The book was translated with funding from the National Technical University of Athens, within the framework of the Interdepartmental Postgraduate Programme in Urban and Regional Planning, and from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales ↩︎
2. See, among many, European Agenda for Migration 2015; Emergency Support Instrument 2016; EU-Turkey Statement 2016, and the recognition of Turkey as a “safe third country.” ↩︎
3. This discussion is connected with concerns about the weakening of the nation-state within the framework of a globalised economy. However, the relaxation of controls concerns the movement of capital, goods, and information, not the movements of migrants and refugees, which remain subject to multiple restrictions and power relations at different scales. ↩︎
4. Characteristic title of a conference on migration (Et pourtant elles bougent!) organised by the renowned historian Michelle Perrot in 1983. ↩︎

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Interdisciplinary Migration Research Unit (IMRU) or the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE).

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