Constructing Gender Across Borders: A Transnational Approach

Abstract

Purpose – This conceptual essay delineates a transnational methodology for the study of gender and migration. Approach – I summarize selectively some of the current research about the ways in which gender and family life change when they are enacted across borders and present findings from two empirical studies, based on fieldwork carried out in the Dominican Republic and in Peru. Findings – I show the ideological engines of changing gender relations from two different sites in the transnational social fields in which migrants are embedded: social remittances and the vernacularization of global ideas about women's rights. When migrants send social remittances, or ideas, practices, and know-how, back to their homelands, they challenge conventional ideas about marriage, child-rearing, and women's work. The impact of global ideas about women's rights, and how they are vernacularized or made understandable and useful in local contexts, very much depends on the historical, cultural, and organizational contexts through which they travel. Implications – The chapter has both practical and social implications showing how using a transnational optic elucidates aspects of contemporary social experience that are obscured when we assume that the nation-state is the logical automatic container within which social life takes place.