ORIGINAL ARTICLE Cultural–legal brokering and gender: A study of refugee-serving institutions upon resettlement Odessa Gonzalez Benson 1,2 | Leila Asadi 3 | Ana Paula Pimentel Walker 4 | Mieko Yoshihama 1 1 School of Social Work, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA 2 Detroit School of Urban Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA 3 School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA 4 Taubman College of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA Correspondence Odessa Gonzalez Benson, School of Social Work, University of Michigan, 1080 S University Ave, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. Email: odessagb@umich.edu Funding information Michigan Institute for Clinical & Health Research, Grant/Award Number: U061680; University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender Abstract Increased academic attention to the intersections of refugee studies and gender studies has focused on the lives and trajectories of refugee women. In this study, we examine resettlement institutions involved with refugee women, drawing upon critical scholarship on “brokerage.” Brokers reproduce and impose the powers of the state, but also negotiate with and resist the state. We draw from interviews with resettlement workers and refugee leaders in refugee-serving institutions, focusing on one mid-sized metropolitan area in the United States. We argue that resettlement institutions enact brokering not only in the cultural domain but also the legal domain. We further posit that cultural–legal brokering is enacted via contested negotiation of idealized patri- archal values–traditions in both the countries of origin and resettlement. KEYWORDS brokering, gender, refugee organizations, refugee resettlement policy, refugee women, refugee-serving institutions INTRODUCTION Scholarship on the intersections of refugee status and gender have proliferated over the last two decades in the domain of global forced migration. Studies in places of resettlement, including the USA, have also begun to focus on the compounding challenges that come with being both a woman and a refugee during resettlement. In recent decades, gender equality (Hyndman & de Alwis, 2008) and feminist perspectives (Carastathis et al., 2018; Oswin, 2011) have reshaped our under- standing of the gendered resettlement experience, problematizing essentializing tendencies that have been all too common. Scholarship on gender and refugee resettlement has yielded much about the micro level (individual experi- ences of refugees) and macro level (policy and struc- tural analyses), but there has relatively been lesser attention on the meso or institutional level (the provi- sion of social assistance or social services). Some insti- tutional studies of resettlement have made inroads and yielded key insights (Darrow, 2015; Shutes, 2011), including those by Nawyn (2010) and Oswin (2011) that focus on gender but, there is yet much to be Received: 2 September 2021 Accepted: 14 March 2023 DOI: 10.1111/ijsw.12602 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2023 The Authors. International Journal of Social Welfare published by Akademikerförbundet SSR (ASSR) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Int J Soc Welf. 2023;1–13. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ijsw 1