Transnational labour migration, intimacy and relationships: how Zimbabwean women navigate the diaspora

Abstract

Globalization, defined here as the increasing interconnectedness of the world, along with shifting socio-political and economic landscapes predominantly in the Global South culminate into increased transnational labour migration processes. These transnational processes call for new interpretations and conceptualizations of gender and sexuality with respect to notions of intimacy, relationships and identities in the diaspora. Drawing on interviews with 28 Zimbabwean women (14 living in the diaspora and 14 resident in Zimbabwe) aged between 25 and 90 years, this paper analyses ways in which transnational processes influence how women experience and assign meaning to their gendered and sexual lives. The 14 diaspora-based interviewees illuminated how Zimbabwean women located in South Africa and the UK often redefine their gendered and sexual identities as they exercise agency by challenging economic barriers and simultaneously crossing socio-cultural boundaries from their homeland. Conversely, the 14 Zimbabwe-based interviewees discussed how women from a different generation and geographical location read emerging questions of gender and sexuality in the diaspora. Overall, the paper offers profound gendered lenses through which one could analyse the dynamics of transnational processes, especially how labour, intimacy and relationships in the diaspora are experienced by immigrants and subsequently engaged by diaspora studies scholars.