Abstract
AbstractNew forms of transnational families are being created by the feminization of migration, particularly of mobile Southeast Asian female workers who take on the financial responsibility of supporting their nieces and nephews who remain in the home country. This understudied kin relationship provides important insights into the complexities of transnational belonging among childless women. Fieldwork conducted in 2015 with Indonesian professional migrant women in Melbourne, Australia, reveals a translocalized Javanese cultural practice of fostering nieces and nephews. Using a framework that extends the anthropology of belonging into a gendered transnational context, in this article I argue that children who are absent, whether living in another country or never born, are yet present in women's narratives and are key to a larger migrant project of recreating oneself as an ambiguously valued subject.
Highlights
New forms of transnational families are being created by the feminization of migration, of mobile Southeast Asian female workers who take on the financial responsibility of supporting their nieces and nephews who remain in the home country
Significant scholarly work has focused on the absent children who are left behind in Indonesia and the Philippines by migrant mothers, on the impact these absences have on their families (Graham et al 2012; Pratt 2003)
Reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization (IVF) may or may not bring a child into a family, but their mere existence keeps the spectre of the hoped-for children alive for Indah in her day-to-day life as a chance to change her subjectivity to that of a birth mother and to belong to the ideal heteronormative family, as expected of her as an Indonesian female migrant in Australia
Summary
Monika (2018) Don't call me ibu: challenges of belonging for childless transnational Indonesian women. Note that access to this version may require subscription. Don’t call me ibu: challenges of belonging for childless transnational Indonesian women
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