Introduction: Understanding Emotions in Transmigration in Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States

Abstract

Neo-liberalist agendas have restructured the sites of production, consumption and migration, in late modernity with gender playing a pivotal role in the reshaping of these sites. However, narratives around neo-liberalism and migration have largely ignored an analysis of emotions. Ahmed (2000, p. 90) shows that ‘the journeys of migration involve a splitting of home as place of origin and home as the sensory world of everyday experience. What migration narratives involve, then, is spatial reconfiguration of an embodied self: a transformation in the very skin through which the body is embodied.’ In this book, we consider the intersection of emotions and transmigration, more particularly, the transformation of identity and emotions of female migrants in Europe and Southeast Asia and the United States. The interrelationship of geographical and emotional spaces of nation, identity and emotions is examined as they intersect in a complex framing with a raft of emotions characterized by trauma, grief, guilt, love, violence and rage.KeywordsEuropean UnionMigrant WorkerAsylum SeekerDomestic WorkerMigrant WomanThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.