Ungrateful Girl Refugees in Lore Segal's Other People's Houses and Vesna Maric's Bluebird

in Girlhood Studies
Author:
Carly Mclaughlin Researcher, Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau, Germany carly.mclaughlin@th-wildau.de

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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7656-6444
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3167/ghs.2024.170103
Keywords:
displaced girls; forced migration; girl refugeetude; gratitude; immigration; Kindertransport; memoir
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Abstract

Against the background of recent extraordinary narratives of displaced girls, I consider two accounts of refugee girls in Britain at earlier historical moments: Lore Segal's Other People's Houses ([1964] 2018) about her memories of being a Kindertransportee in the late 1930s, and Vesna Maric's Bluebird (2009), a memoir of her journey into refugeehood as a teenage girl following the outbreak of the war in Bosnia in the early 1990s. I read their framing of the refugee experience as interventions into hegemonic scripts of displaced girlhood that ultimately destabilize the wider stories of nationhood that such narratives often uphold. Read through the frames of girlhood and refugeetude, these narratives point to alternative modes of imagining refugee girls and their position in and beyond the nation.

Contributor Notes

Carly McLaughlin (ORCID: 0000-0002-7656-6444) works at the Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau. Her research is concerned with narratives and representations of forced migration, and she is currently co-editing two forthcoming volumes, the Routledge Companion to Migration Literature and Narratives of Precarious Migrancy in the Global South. She has published at the intersection of childhood studies and forced migration studies, with a particular focus on how the politics of childhood affects the representation and treatment of child migrants, especially in the context of illegalized migration. Email: carly.mclaughlin@th-wildau.de

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Girlhood Studies

An Interdisciplinary Journal

Cover Girlhood Studies
Article Category:
Research Article
Page Count:
17
Keywords:
displaced girls; forced migration; girl refugeetude; gratitude; immigration; Kindertransport; memoir
Print Publication Date:
01 Mar 2024
Online Publication Date:
01 Mar 2024
Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2024

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