Abstract
Abstract Based on focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with Greek, Italian, and Spanish mothers living in Norway, this article contributes to an emerging body of literature on the role of emotions in migration by exploring migrant motherhood as an emotional journey. Drawing on the work of Arlie Hochschild on emotions and her theoretical concepts of framing rules, feeling rules, and emotion work, the article explores how migrant mothers reflect on their emotions when raising their children in the context of migration. Migrant mothers’ accounts illustrate the ambivalent and contradictory emotional experiences they have when they manage rules about how they should make sense of, and feel about their mothering in both host and origin countries. Emotions of guilt, blame, remorse, pride, satisfaction, confidence, and happiness shaped mothers’ experiences of motherhood and social interactions across countries. Through emotion work, migrant mothers managed interdependent emotions and related to different feeling rules establishing and maintaining relationships across places, and negotiating, in this way, their belonging to multiple contexts. Using an emotions-based sociological perspective, we look at motherhood as a field for studying the functions of emotions and their interactions in the context of migration.
Highlights
Emotions have been a major domain of psychology, sociological and anthropological research have recently recognized their centrality in shaping how we experience and construct the world (Anderson and Smith 2001; Davidson and Milligan 2004; Svasek 2010; Walsh 2012)
Scholarship has addressed the emotional dynamics of transnational families (Baldassar 2008; Abrego 2014), yet the emotional implications of mothering in a new country have remained unexplored. We address this gap by offering an analysis of how migrant mothers reframe their realities through navigating different feeling rules, and how they make sense of their experiences and emotions as active agents
This article aimed to shed light on the emotional journey of motherhood in migration by exploring the reflections of Greek, Italian, and Spanish mothers living in Norway on their experiences and emotions regarding mothering
Summary
Emotions have been a major domain of psychology, sociological and anthropological research have recently recognized their centrality in shaping how we experience and construct the world (Anderson and Smith 2001; Davidson and Milligan 2004; Svasek 2010; Walsh 2012). Migrants engage emotionally with host and origin countries through conflicting emotions that are felt before, during, and after migration. These shape their experiences and influence the meaning-making process. In this regard, there has been growing interest in exploring how emotions and mobility are interrelated (Ryan 2008; Svasek 2010), and studies have found that migrants strengthen social bonds and create or maintain attachment to places through their emotions (Baldassar 2008, 2015; Maehara 2010; Vermot 2015)
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