Gendered media, changing intimacy: internet-mediated transnational communication in the family sphere

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which migrants use the internet to maintain family relationships and how the difference in digital knowledge and skills between men and women serves to transform the power dynamics in the family sphere transnationally. It examines the intersection of the research areas of transnationalism, digital inequality and family. While the discussion of digital inequalities is seldom embedded in the context of transnational families, research on migrants and their families rarely investigates the impacts of digital inequality on gendered power dynamics. Focusing on the context of Chinese migrants in London and their ageing parents in China, this study identifies how the supposedly feminine role of care and intimacy is now increasingly reassigned to male family members in a transnational process as the internet has largely replaced other media to become the most significant tool in transborder family communication. Women in transnational families are thus silenced. Three modes of coping skills have been adopted by these women; that is, absence, assistance and empowerment. By identifying modes of resistance, this article highlights spaces of agency under the gendered structure of family communication and their potential limits.