Conforming Female Citizens in the Making: Gender, Ethnicity and the Local-Level Incorporation Policies in Paris and Helsinki

Traditionally thought of as symbols of the national collective and generally in a more precarious socioeconomic position than men, migrant women have emerged as a target group of specific integration schemes in France and Finland. From the perspective of the State, both the women’s individual right and opportunities and the integratedness of the nation and its gendered order are at stake. Based on an ethnographic field research conducted between 2011 and 2013 at a municipality-run community center – a “neighbourhood house” - in a disadvantaged neighbourhood with a large migrant population in the Paris and the Helsinki metropolitan areas, this paper draws attention to how national conceptions of gender, ethnicity and citizenship are applied at the local level of social work. The comparative analysis of the conceptions of female citizenship informing the policies, the unfolding of everyday practices of immigrant incorporation, and the power dynamics inherent to the institutional setting reveals how and under what conditions local-level incorporation policies generate both social exclusion and inclusion among migrant women along different boundaries in the two European contexts.