Alienation, gender, and transnational lives: an ethnographic study of undocumented Afghan women in Istanbul

This article examines the lived experiences of undocumented Afghan women in Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu district through a feminist ethnographic lens. Drawing on multi-year fieldwork and collaboration with the Istanbul Afghan Women’s Association, the study explores how structural barriers, legal precarity, and patriarchal family governance produce intersecting forms of alienation and resilience. The analysis integrates Seeman’s concept of alienation, feminist intersectionality, and transnational migration theory to illuminate how women navigate powerlessness, normlessness, and bounded belonging under conditions of undocumented life. Findings reveal that exclusion from documentation, education, and healthcare generates an ‘exclusion cascade’, while household authority and social isolation intensify gendered confinement. Despite these constraints, women sustain informal economies, cooperative care networks, and translocal aspirations centred on their children’s futures. The study conceptualizes temporal precarity as a key analytical lens—capturing how protracted uncertainty shapes migrants’ time horizons, aspirations, and agency. By bridging feminist and transnational perspectives, this research contributes to global debates on gendered undocumented migration and advances a nuanced understanding of survival, dignity, and belonging in displacement contexts.