Transnational family networks in the Somali diaspora in Egypt: women's roles and differentiated experiences

Diasporic Somalis are increasingly leading a transnational life in which family members are sustained through networks of relations, obligations and resources that are located in different nation-states. These networks and relations enable diasporic Somalis to seek safety for themselves and their relatives, minimize risks and maximize family resources. In this article, I examine three key dimensions of such a way of life, namely: migration; remittances; and transnational family care. I focus on the roles that women play in this family-based support system. For instance, women move and facilitate the movement of other family members; they remit to family members; and they provide care for children and sick relatives. But these transnational households are not free from tensions. Family members are placed in hierarchical relations shaped by age; parental authority; possession of western citizenship; financial resources; and bonds of familial reciprocity and gratitude. Women gain appreciation from relatives and a sense of self-respect for their new roles. Some of the women also make use of the family network to arrange for the care of their children and sick relatives, while they engage in transnational trading activities. However, young and single female relatives often sacrifice or delay their individual dreams because of their familial obligations. I conclude that transnationalism – as a way of organizing and sustaining livelihood, resources and relations of Somali families – is not always emancipating or marginalizing for Somali women. Rather the benefits and challenges of such a way of life for women are different, mixed and uneven.     

‘I am going,with or without you’: autonomy in Bolivian transnational migrations

Autonomy has often been seen as a precondition for achieving gender equality, yet feminist scholarship has been rather ambivalent towards it. In this article, I explore this ambivalence by drawing on the experiences of migrant women, particularly mothers, focusing on the ways in which they negotiated their mobility with their partners. By analysing women's experiences of migration within a context of multi-sited and longitudinal, itinerant ethnography, I historicise their life accounts and place them within a broader framework of social and economic structural changes. On this basis I explore the concept of autonomy, particularly in relation to the exercise of women's agency within a context of market-oriented neoliberal reforms. I also question the potential of women's autonomy for gender equality and argue that there are at least two reasons for feminist scholars to continue being ambivalent towards autonomy.     

A transnational millet in the Jewish state: A Judeo-Spanish diaspora between Israel and Turkey, 1948–1958

Between 1948 and 1956, 36,302 Jews migrated from Turkey to Israel, forming the largest Turkish diaspora hub at that time. Drawing on the nine newspapers published by Turkish Jews in Israel in their vernacular, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), this article sheds light on the complex nature of the migrants' transnational affinity to the Turkish Republic and on how it coexisted with their Jewish nationalism. In addition to situating this development within the broader context of post-WWII Turkish transnationalism, we also delineate their unique historic status as ethnic Jewish communities or millet. Examining the post-Ottoman era, we show how they leveraged their political, commercial and leisure-related ties with Turkey—deemed more developed in those terms than Israel—to empower themselves as an ethnic community and to facilitate their integration into the Jewish state. In so doing, this study bridges some of the gaps in the analyses of Muslim and non-Muslim migrations, and it suggests that we rethink the languages used to explore Turkish transnationalism as well as its geographical borders and underlying characteristics.     

Suburban women and the ‘glocalisation’ of the everyday lives: gender and glocalities in underprivileged areas in Sweden

This article presents results from two case studies of marginalised housing areas on the outskirts of two major cities in Sweden. The areas have been analysed through the lens of glocalisation of the everyday lives. The aim is to illustrate and gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of, and relationship between, place, gender and transnationalism. The article contests the simplified image of migrant women in these marginalised areas as local-bound and isolated. It analyses their everyday lives as spaces of glocality, with a particular focus on local and global networks, local and global meeting places, and relationships to local authorities. The aim is to disseminate new knowledge about the complexities of these women's lives in a global–local context, which also has implications for the theoretical concept of glocality. Through the concept of glocality, the beneficial as well as the negative aspects of these women's lives in marginalised neighbourhoods are illustrated.     

Introduction: the feminist politics of refugee migration

The interdisciplinary field of refugee studies includes gender analyses, but feminism is not its forte. Scholarship in the field has neglected the development of feminist frameworks to trace the power relations that shape the gender and other politics of forced migration. Specifically, the underplayed concept of ‘refugee transnationalism’ is elaborated as a form of globalization where the social and political intersect in particular ways.     

Gender,migration, mobility and transnationalism

In reviewing the expanding body of work on the linkages between gender, mobility, migration and transnationalism in Gender, Place and Culture over the last decade, this article highlights three significant contributions. First, through critical engagement with transnationalism studies, the journal has produced a sophisticated and variegated strand of work on gender politics and multiple forms of migration and mobility. In this article, we focus primarily on mobility in terms of human movement across national borders, rural–urban migration, as well as the ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ that inform the embodied experiences of being here and there simultaneously as iterated in transnationalism studies [L. Basch, N.G. Schiller, and C.S. Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-States. London: Routledge, 1994]. A second area of strength lies in the coalescence of work providing insights into the connections between social reproduction in a globalising world and intimate forms of global mobility and migration. A third highlight relates to the mutually constitutive relationship between the construction of masculinities and masculinist ideologies, on the one hand, and migration, mobility and transnationalism, on the other. The article concludes with a discussion of two more embryonic areas which merit further development in the journal: the first concerns the social and geographical (im)mobilities implied in cross-border reproductive care1^1. CBRC is what Payne (2013 Payne, J.2013. “Reproduction in Transition: Cross-Border Egg Donation, Biodesirability and New Reproductive Subjectivities on the European Fertility Market.” Gender, Place and Culture, doi:10.1080/0966369X.2013.832656. [Google Scholar]) attributes to the rapid development and spread of assisted reproductive technologies that have given rise to a global market for human eggs, sperm and surrogates. and the global mobility and assemblage of body parts, while the second relates to the distinctive role that feminist geographers interested in migrations and mobilities can play in working collaboratively and transnationally across different worlds.     

Lost boys,invisible girls: stories of Sudanese marriages across borders

Forced migration challenges and changes gender relations. The transnational activities of refugees resettled in the West create gender asymmetries among those who stay behind. This article explores the transnational marriages of young southern Sudanese women (‘invisible girls’), who either stayed in Sudan or remained in refugee camps in Kenya, to Sudanese men who were resettled to America, Canada or Australia (‘lost boys’). Incorporating gender as a relational category into the analysis of transnational practices that migrants and refugees engage in is important. The article argues that there is a need to put feminist analysis at the centre of transnational processes resulting from (forced) migration. It looks at the connections between different geographical locations, the impacts of the migration of young refugee men on bridewealth and marriage negotiations and the gender consequences for young women, men and their families. It is argued that transnational activities, such as marriage, contest, reconfigure and reinforce the culturally inscribed gender norms and practices in and across places. Transnational marriage results in ambiguous benefits for women (and men) in accessing greater freedoms. Anthropological analyses of marriage need a geographical focus on the transnational fields in which they occur. The article seeks to deepen understanding of the nuanced gendered consequences of transnationalism. It shows how gender analysis of actions taken across different locations can contribute to the theorisation of transnational studies of refugees and migrants.     

Reproducing,transforming and contesting gender relations and identities through migration and transnational ties

This article contributes to conceptual debates on gender transformations in the context of migration and transnationalism. We do so by discussing developments in gender relations and identities among Polish post-accession migrants in Norway; analysing the intersections of continuities and changes, relationally, as these are produced spatially and temporally. We draw on ethnographic data collected among Polish migrants in the Norwegian cities Oslo and Bergen (2009–2012). Our focus on continuity and change in gender relations and identities, in the context of migration and transnationalism, stems from a realization that migration often leads to assumptions of either radical change, or conservative continuity. Meanwhile through an analytical lens sensitive to relationality and socio-spatial circumstances, we find friction, disagreement, as well as negotiation and resolution, and we argue for the variety of ways in which continuity and change may run parallel, reflective of variations in transnational habitus produced in relation to social class. We pay attention to locations and scales, as salient for how gender relations and identities are reproduced, transformed or contested. The flexible continuum we find reveals diverse strategies of coping with migratory situations, as well as complex interplay between migrants’ agency, existing structures and engendered understandings.     

Negotiating and queering US hegemony in TV drama: popular geopolitics and cultural studies

This article argues that popular geopolitics should pay closer attention to entertainment television and to the negotiations, complexities, and contradictions associated with contemporary televisual texts. This move requires a closer engagement with media and cultural studies than that initiated to date. In the second half of the article, we discuss the ABC TV drama Commander in Chief, which follows the first female president of the USA, and is set in a post-9/11 world wherein the struggle for US geopolitical domination has become a much more complex endeavor. We end by wondering whether entertainment television might provide us with imaginative resources for queering US hegemony.     

‘Shew Yourselves as Men’: Gender,Citizenship and Political Propaganda in the 1773 and 1774 Worcester Election Contests

This case study of the 1773 and 1774 election contests in the city of Worcester investigates how members of the local oligarchy, and the political opposition to that oligarchy, drew on contemporary discourses on citizenship to convince the electorate that their candidate would become a worthy representative of their city in parliament, and to refute the claims of their opponents. Since independence was absolutely essential to the voters’ identities as male householder citizens, this became the main issue of conflict. The candidate of the opposition interest, Sir Watkin Lewes, sought to establish himself as the guardian of the independence of the citizens of Worcester against the corrupt corporation. The candidates of the corporation, Thomas Bates Rous and his successor, Colonel Nicholas Lechmere, instead claimed that Lewes was the real threat, as his anti‐corruption campaign deprived the voters of the usual fruits of the election. While such claims also entailed an appeal by the local elite to the financial interest of the voters, the need to justify this incentive ideologically, and the high portion of voters who turned their backs on their patrons, does suggest the power embedded in the concept of citizenship in the political life at the level of the localities. Gendered and classed conceptions of citizenship, furthermore, were employed as offensive weapons in the political propaganda surrounding the elections, as each faction sought to discredit the other by claiming that they were neither manly enough, nor of the proper social status, to qualify as worthy political subjects. Thus, citizenship was not only fundamentally gendered in the masculine, but also highly hierarchical and equally intertwined with contemporary notions of class.     

Conscripting the breast: lactation,slavery and salvation in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca,c. 1250–1300

This essay examines the ideals and practices surrounding motherhood and wet nursing in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca c. 1250–1300. Despite powerful messages — from ecclesiastical pronouncements to lay devotional manuals to artwork in churches — that linked maternal breastfeeding to an educative and caring ideal of mothering, social and economic pressures on wealthy urban and knightly women to remain as sexually available and as fecund as possible caused a shift to increased use of wet nurses, many of whom were of Muslim origin. Although the latter would have been nominally baptized, in practice, if not normative legal ideal, they maintained their enslaved status no matter how many children they bore. Indeed, it is possible that such women's bodies were doubly exploited: first, as sexual chattel available to their masters and other men, and then, having been made pregnant, as nursing mothers whose own children could be put away in favour of their mistresses'. Only fragmentary examples of such women ‘conversing’ with one another have been found, but the observations offered here open up to the historian's view a social scenario in which we know many conversations among women must have taken place.     

Conscripting the breast: lactation,slavery and salvation in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca,c. 1250–1300

This essay examines the ideals and practices surrounding motherhood and wet nursing in the realms of Aragon and kingdom of Majorca c. 1250–1300. Despite powerful messages — from ecclesiastical pronouncements to lay devotional manuals to artwork in churches — that linked maternal breastfeeding to an educative and caring ideal of mothering, social and economic pressures on wealthy urban and knightly women to remain as sexually available and as fecund as possible caused a shift to increased use of wet nurses, many of whom were of Muslim origin. Although the latter would have been nominally baptized, in practice, if not normative legal ideal, they maintained their enslaved status no matter how many children they bore. Indeed, it is possible that such women's bodies were doubly exploited: first, as sexual chattel available to their masters and other men, and then, having been made pregnant, as nursing mothers whose own children could be put away in favour of their mistresses'. Only fragmentary examples of such women ‘conversing’ with one another have been found, but the observations offered here open up to the historian's view a social scenario in which we know many conversations among women must have taken place.