Transnational Motherhood Research Articles

"Losing motherhood": African immigrant women and their perspectives on transnational mothering

"Losing motherhood": African immigrant women and their perspectives on transnational mothering

Doing family: Nicaraguan transnational families’ narratives on motherhood

AbstractThis article explores transnational motherhood from the perspective of Nicaraguan migrant workers in Spain and Nicaraguan family members caring for migrant women's children. Our sample included families with children who have special needs, to explore how economically disadvantaged families draw upon migration as a strategy to address educational and physical needs not provided by a weak ‘exclusionary’ social policy regime. Applying the notion of the family display to migrant mothers and their families, our research reveals how gendered expectations of parenting shape their experience and the ways in which they explain and justify the migratory project. Migrants and family members, with certain reservations and limitations, actively reinvent motherhood by (re)constructing financial contribution as a type of caring. Our research also unsettles the classic notion of the ‘other mother’, as respondents describe caring as distributed over extended kin networks.

(Un)folding places with care: Migrant caregivers ‘dwelling‐in‐folds’

AbstractThis paper is based on longitudinal ethnographic work among Bulgarian migrant women who work as live‐in caregivers and domestic workers in Italian households and explores the analytical potential of place and place making for transmigration literature by conceptualizing the co‐production of place with subjectivities. Such approach sensitizes to mundane practices of care and belonging, which actively create migratory lives of meaning. Drawing on Deleuze's concept of the fold as subjectivity and Clifford's notion of dwelling‐in‐travelling, I propose the term ‘dwelling‐in‐folds’ – and its mechanism ‘folding place’ – in order to make sense of temporary migrants’ experience of place(s) that foregrounds their ability to connect and reconcile fractures and discontinuities, particularly when doing transnational motherhood. In doing so, the paper folds place empirically – showing how ‘dwelling‐in‐folds’ is achieved and unfolds place analytically – demonstrating the potential of this concept for sociology and transmigration studies.

Considering the Role of Money and Gifts in the (Re)-construction of Motherhood and Family Among Indonesian Transnational Female Domestic Workers

Most studies on female migrants as money earners claim that this new context of labor exhibits two distinct realms of either the commodification of love and care or the expression of care where money and emotion intertwine in maintaining family relationships and in creating reciprocity and exchange. I explore different modes of using money and gifts in addition to the major framework of economization of emotion and the emotionalization of money. I differentiate the gifts from money as it refers to non-cash gifts or in-kind gifts. This paper investigates other cultural contexts and social-political dynamics that possibly induce the construction of different roles of money and gifts. It assesses the kinship strategies and mechanisms female migrants, and their stayed-behind children develop in response to physical separation by sending money and gifts and their resistance to the state’s dominant version of the family and money. This paper elaborates how money and gifts connect to women’s identity as transnational mothers to redefine their parenting roles as main economic providers and their identity as transnational family members. It has some bearing on creating a new identity as women that might be not akin to the state’s gender politics and the politics of family as well as state maternalism. The study interrogates how sending and receiving money and gifts in a transnational family engenders transformation in the construction of the family and motherhood. I analyze how the practice of sending money and gifts challenges the state’s politics of traditional family and gender by examining how sending money and gifts frequently gains legitimacy with the migrant mothers’ claim of having a good family even though they do not adhere to traditional family norms.

Depressive Symptoms and Emotional Distress of Transnational Mothers: A Scoping Review.

Background: Female led migration is a recent trend that has been gaining momentum, particularly in Latin America. However, little attention has been given to the psychological consequences of mothers who leave their children in their country of origin and migrate to a host country to work. Therefore, it is important to investigate the mental health status of transnational mothers and to further identify issues for intervention and supportive services.Methods: PubMed, PsycINFO, ERIC, CENTRAL, Scopus, and ScienceDirect databases were searched systematically for peer-reviewed articles published from inception through July 2019. The search included the following terms: migrant, immigrant, transnational, transnational mother, AND mood disorders, depressive symptoms, and depression. Initially, 8,375 studies were identified. After exclusionary criteria were applied, 17 studies were identified and included in the review.Results: We found six quantitative studies that investigated depressive symptoms among transnational mothers. Of these studies, three found a positive association between transnational motherhood and depressive symptoms; three of these articles found a null correlation. A total of eight qualitative studies and three mixed-methods studies were found that addressed depressive symptoms and emotional distress among transnational mothers. The eight qualitative studies identified highlighted the significant emotional distress transnational mothers experience. Lastly, the three mixed-methods studies similarly discussed the emotional hardships faced by transnational mothers.Implications: The studies identified suggest that depressive symptoms and emotional distress are prevalent among transnational mothers. Therefore, public health social workers and other mental health providers need to focus on developing strategies to identify and screen transnational mothers for depressive symptoms.

Weapons of the weak twisted in jars of love. The transnational maternal foodways of Polish migrants in Brussels

The aim of the article is to analyse social change in the area of the gendered care practices and identities of migrant mothers, who were forced by the social and economic situation in Poland to (illegally) work abroad without their children and families. It asks what kind of experiences of social change we can find if we look at the foodways practised by transnational mothers from the working classes. The concepts of "transnational maternal foodways" and "maternal bustling around foodways" will be used as tropes to discuss and explore the gendered changes in motherhood experienced by Polish migrants. The analysis presented here is based on the results of extensive fieldwork conducted both in the villages and small towns of Eastern Poland and in Belgium (particularly in its capital, Brussels), and on 54 autobiographical narrative interviews with Polish women who, during the two decades after the fall of socialism in Poland (1989–2010), worked permanently or cyclically abroad. The analysis combines critical food studies with gender and migration studies.

Migrant mothers and the ambivalence of co-ethnicity in online communities

ABSTRACT Since the advent of digital and mobile communication technologies, scholars have been investigating how these technologies are changing experiences of migration and mobility. In the field of gender and migration, researchers have shown how the experience of migration can change maternal practices, and alter understandings of ‘good motherhood’. These ‘digital migrant’ and ‘migrant motherhood’ literatures have intersected in studies of technologically mediated transnational mothering, in the context of mother–child separation. In contrast, this study focuses on migrant mothers in Australia who are co-located with their children. Drawing on interviews with migrant mothers from a range of migrant communities in Sydney and Melbourne, this article explores how the use of online migrant maternal communities helps women to navigate motherhood in a migrant context. Specifically, it draws attention to the ways migrant mothers use the affordances of social media to work through their complex and ambivalent feelings about their migrant maternal identities and practices, and about co-ethnic social networks. The paper foregrounds the role of the imagination and relationships in shaping migrant identities and experiences and proposes the ‘migrant maternal imaginary’ as a valuable concept for understanding migrant motherhood.

Transnationalizing lifelong learning: taking the standpoint of Chinese immigrant mothers

ABSTRACT This paper examines the dynamic intersection of lifelong learning, transnational migration and migrant motherhood by locating Chinese immigrant mothers’ transnational learning and mothering experience. It aims to understand how Chinese immigrant mothers learn mothering skills, reconstruct identities, and practise mothering in transnational spaces. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrant mothers in Canada, this paper finds three major dimensions of immigrant mothers’ transnational lifelong learning practice: (1) the good mother/bad mother binary and motherhood learning; (2) lifelong learning within transnational families; and (3) learning mothering as transnational cultural capital. This paper argues that taking Chinese immigrant mothers’ learning and mothering experience as a standpoint is critical to view transnational lifelong learning as non-linear, fluid, and dynamic. This perspective could assist scholars to acknowledge the experience, identity, work, and knowledge of immigrant mothers, to highlight the intersectionality of race, gender, and class, critically analyse the public/private binary and the learning space of lifelong learners, to reflect on the relationship between learning, mothering and transnational cultural capital, and to examine the race, gender and class relations underlying the changing meanings of lifelong learning in the context of transnational migration.

Korean transnational mothers’ bilingual support for their children - Language ideologies and practices at home -

Korean transnational mothers’ bilingual support for their children - Language ideologies and practices at home -

Emotional problems: policymaking and empathy through the lens of transnational motherhood

ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore the role of social empathy in policymaking. Social empathy extends empathy from an interpersonal disposition to the social and political structures that inform policy processes and outcomes. Empathy requires an emotional understanding of phenomena, which we suggest can be cultivated through an emotional analysis of policy, and can result in more socially just outcomes. Building on social work and emotional policy analysis research, we present a framework for both nurturing and applying empathy in policy contexts, which is then applied to the case of Canada’s Caregiver Program. We demonstrate how emotional discourse analysis exposes the various subject positions of both the analyst and policy subjects, implicating disciplinary forces that hinder connection between actors. Once such forces are illuminated, policymakers can reconfigure policy in more socially just ways. We thus emphasize the transformative potential of fostering empathy in and through policymaking.

Mothers and nation in the global era: The role of evangelical Protestant mothers in the discursive construction of multicultural Korea

Despite scholarly work examining mothers’ roles in nation-building, few studies have investigated how religion plays a role in the process. Comparing two groups of evangelical Protestant mothers, namely, transnational and domestic mothers, this study argues that religion powerfully shapes mothers’ understanding of multiculturalism but only alongside their cosmopolitan experiences. Drawing on in-depth interviews with evangelical mothers originating from Seoul, South Korea, the article examines how mothers perceive multicultural families and children, in comparison with Korean citizens, and investigates the strategies they use in making discursive boundaries to include immigrants. The findings show that transnational mothers have a more inclusive perception of multicultural families and children than domestic mothers, through their use of the interconnected languages of religion and cosmopolitanism. The article claims that an intersectional lens helps us understand mothers’ unique ways of imagining a multicultural Korea, emphasizing their complex positions in families, churches, and global communities. The study contributes to bringing a religious and cosmopolitan focus into the literature on mothers and nation, negating the monolithic media portrayal of religious women as a homogeneous group preserving a total identity in conservative views.

La mère de…: gendered migration and displaced mothering in Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de…

ABSTRACT This article addresses issues of gender, migration and race in Sembène’s La Noire de… (1966) through an examination of the film’s representation of transnational motherhood and maternal-domestic labour. While commentators tend to read the film’s female characters in terms of an allegory of imperial violence between France and Senegal, this article argues that La Noire de… should be simultaneously considered as an intimate portrayal of the effects of colonialism and gendered experiences of migration, particularly in relation to mothers and familial relations. It begins by situating the film within the political and cultural climate of 1960s France, focusing on attitudes towards migration and population that inform Sembène’s depiction of imperialism in France. The author examines Sembène’s representation of mothering relations as a key nodal articulation of the gendered effects of migration. She considers the protagonist’s exploitation as a source of maternal labour to support the mothering activities of her employer, and her transnational relationship with her own mother, arguing that the latter is central in articulating the abuses of neo-colonial displacement and also constructed as a potential site of empowerment.

Migration as a Source of Suffering in the Context of the Biographical Experience of the Process of Transformation in Poland. Case Study of Weronika’s Life History

The article focuses on the case study of the life history of Weronika, a person biographically experiencing the consequences of the transformation process in Poland. On the one hand, the text concentrates on showing the change in the status of the narrator’s family from a privileged position in the socialist period to the experience of unemployment and poverty after 1989. On the other hand, the text analyzes the necessity of the narrator’s mother’s emigration to Italy in the mid-1990s. Thus, the article focuses on the narrator’s experience in the context of being a migrant woman’s child. This experience is related to the time of socialization and education, which was difficult for the narrator, and the consequence of which is shown in the text in connection to the narrator’s persistence in trajectory. The text also presents the perspective of transnational motherhood within the framework of Polish women’s migrations after 1989. Also, an important perspective adapted in the article is the experience of migration by the narrator, who at the time of the interview has also been living in Italy for 10 years. Permanent emigration of the narrator is associated in her life history with high biographical costs. The article is, therefore, an attempt to present migration as a source of suffering in relation to the context of being a migrant’s child and being a migrant oneself. The analysis of Weronika’s case is also an attempt to show the relationship between the individual experience of the narrator and the mechanisms of collective influence. Thus, the text treats the analyzed life history as one of the biographical accounts reflecting the biographical and social processes assigned to a specific time frame. In this perspective, the text aims to reconstruct the complexity of these processes and to interpret the experienced social reality in an individual biography.

Transnational Mothers and School Related Decisions

This article addresses the question of how transnational Mexican mothers negotiate and participate in the educational trajectories of children in the United States and in Mexico. It illustrates how mothers in New York City are central decision-makers in school-related issues in Mexico and in the United States, even when there is lengthy separation from the children in Mexico, language and legal status barriers with children in the United States. This article argues that mothers in New York and grandmothers in Mexico go through similar challenges when interacting with teachers and school staff in both countries, as they feel like they have little power or influence to assist children. Theoretically, this article is rooted in an anthropological tradition of transnational migration and advances a discussion of the role of gender in migration and education. This article shows a “split-screen” format, comparing the experiences observed on both sides of the border regarding school interactions. Data from phone calls and text messages, across border are used to show the reach of mothers in New York goes beyond formal boundaries. Thus, this article shows how Internet and Communication Technologies (ICT) foster regular interactions between mothers and grandmothers, between mothers in New York City and teachers in Mexico, and between separated siblings when they are doing homework and/or playing.

Transnational Mother Blame: Protecting and Caring in a Globalized Context

ABSTRACTMexican women in both the United States and Mexico face uneven landscapes of benefits and discourses as they negotiate family members’ health. Building on two decades of ethnographic research, I explore how Mexican mothers navigate social and medical services, food provision, food preparation and health, and describe some of the ways that governments in each country abdicate responsibility for shaping structural constraints on citizens’ health. Transnational “mother blame” is a pattern that builds on tropes about the simultaneous responsibility and incapacity of women to ensure their family’s health, while offering new articulations of responsibility in neoliberal, globalized, transnational contexts in which flexible care arrangements are both necessary and denigrated.

Sentimentální peníze aneb Jaká je cena transnacionálního mateřství

Sentimentální peníze aneb Jaká je cena transnacionálního mateřství

Transnational Motherhood and Economic Failure among Immigrant Domestic Workers in South Africa and the United States

This comparative study illustrates how motherhood materializes through the often emotionally heavy choices that women immigrants make as they strive to take care of vulnerable family members in different locations. In so doing, this project illustrates how domestic labor takes shape along with women's strategies for navigating the most intimate relationships across a global stage fraught with economic and political challenges. This research, situated in relation to transnational feminist thought, highlights the strategies that women immigrants use to navigate motherhood and work across national borders. By focusing on the employment experiences and choices of immigrant domestic workers who are part of transnational motherhood flows, The author also explores immigrant women domestic workers' feelings of personal economic failure, as no matter how hard they work, they never seem to be able to pull their families out of poverty. This analysis is based on interviews with Zimbabwean women immigrants working in Johannesberg, South Africa, and Latina domestic workers in San Diego, California

Testing of the factor structure of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale 10 in a sample of Korean “geese” mothers

The author’s purpose in this study was to establish the factor structure of the Korean version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale 10 (CES-D 10) by conducting confirmatory factor analysis based on preexisting models with a sample of Korean transnational mothers (referred to as “geese mothers”). Hundred and fifty-three Korean geese mothers in the USA and New Zealand completed the Korean version of the CES-D 10 questionnaire. The resulting data was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis, which tested three competing models. Our goodness-of-fit indices for the two-factor model indicated an acceptable fit with the current sample. Our results in the present study show that the CES-D 10 can be a useful tool for understanding the concept of depression in Korean geese mothers.

Rethinking stories of transnational mothering in the context of international study

Women's migration has facilitated diverse understandings of both mothering and motherhood. Despite this, transnational mothering tends to be understood in narrowly defined terms, largely associated with economic necessity, with alternative motivations for women's migration and transnational mothering largely absent from existing literature. This research aims to contribute to literature about transnational mothering by drawing on research with mothers in the context of postgraduate international study to explore the different ways in which mothers reproduce, negotiate, contest and diversify narratives of ‘good mothering’. We also bring greater visibility to stories of transnational mothers and illuminate the other interests and aspirations that transnational mothers evoke with regards to their migration. We argue that rethinking stories of transnational mothering allows us to hear about and to value a diversity of mothers' lives, so these mothers do not have to inhabit the margins and periphery of stories of either motherhood or international student life.

Gendered and classed performances of ‘good’ mother and academic in Greece

The enduring significance of gender and how it intersects with class in the organization of parenting, domestic and professional work has been obscured in contemporary neoliberal contexts. This article examines how Greek academic women conceptualize and enact motherhood and the classed and gendered strategies they adopt to reconcile ‘good’ motherhood with notions of the ‘good’ academic professional. It draws on semi-structured interviews about the career narratives of 15 women in Greek medical schools in the aftermath of the Greek recession. The analysis presented in this article is informed by a feminist post-structuralist paradigm and an emic approach to intersectionality. Motherhood emerged in the data as a dynamic concept, and a network of practices both constrained and enabled by gendered and classed family and work cultures. Drawing on a neoliberal ‘DIY’ and ‘having it all’ discourse, Greek mothers claimed that they could achieve almost anything professionally, if they organized their private lives sensibly. They drew on idealized discourses of motherhood, but they also contradicted these notions by doing non-traditional forms of motherhood, such as remote or transnational motherhood, afforded by their privileged social positioning and academic careers. Further research is required to investigate configurations of classed motherhood in less prestigious professions.