Negotiating Intimate Boundaries: Gender, Sexuality, and Migration in 1960s West Germany

ABSTRACT

In the 1960s, the children of unmarried women migrant workers in West Germany became a transnational political case that occupied federal and state authorities, social workers, and consulates. Reproductive matters embodied a state of vulnerability for migrant women who not only feared stigmatization in their home countries, but also faced deportation if they did not give up their children for adoption and had to receive welfare benefits. This article explores the ways in which gender and sexuality deeply shaped labor migration and, as a result, politicized migrants’ private and intimate relations. It argues that pregnancy among unmarried migrant women became a site of conflicting interests of the West German and Turkish migration regimes. Within the constrained space between those two migration regimes, migrant women developed precarious forms of agency such as transnational adoption and abortion. Drawing on archival sources, oral history interviews, and Turkish newspaper reports, the article aims to contribute to the historiography of migration from a gender‐historical perspective that allows for a nuanced understanding of the complex ways in which intimate modes became political points of contention.