Intersections of Xenophobia, Racism, and Gender-Based Violence in the Canadian Context: A Critical Reflection on Everyday Woman-to-Woman Violence.

This research note examines the intersections of xenophobia, racism, and gender-based violence. It particularly focuses on forms of everyday woman-to-woman violence in the Canadian context. This exploration is based on an incident narrated to the author in a recent conversation with D.Š., a 42-year-old woman who emigrated to Nova Scotia in 2014 from Bosnia and Herzegovina with her husband and young son. I read the episode as paradigmatic of how gender informs interactions rooted in prejudice, discrimination, and the 'fear of the other.' Drawing upon intersectional feminist heuristic, my analysis contributes to the investigations of the complex network of power relations operating across the same gender (woman). These woman-to-woman power dynamics are shaped by racial, immigrant, and various other social identities that intersect with gender. This research shows that the relationships resulting from these interactions are, in fact, asymmetrically formed and reconstructed at the micro-level of experience through the exercise of xenophobic expressions of relative sociocultural power and privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]