In this Book

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Engendering Transnational Voices examines the transnational practices and identities of immigrant women, youth, and children in an era of global migration and neoliberalism, addressing such topics as family relations, gender and work, schooling, remittances, cultural identities, caring for children and the elderly, inter- and multi-generational relationships, activism, and refugee determination.

Expressions of power, resistance, agency, and accommodation in relation to the changing concepts of home, family, and citizenship are explored in both theoretical and empirical essays that critically analyze transnational experiences, discourses, cultural identities, and social spaces of women, youth, and children who come from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds; are either first- or second-generation transmigrants; are considered legal or undocumented; and who enter their adopted country as trafficked workers, domestic workers, skilled professionals, or students. The volume gives voice to individual experiences, and focuses on human agency as well as the social, economic, political, and cultural processes inherent in society that enable or disable immigrants to mobilize linkages across national boundaries.

Part I: Experiencing Transnational Family Lives

Chapter 1 Gulf Husbands and Canadian Wives: Transnationalism From Below Among South Asians—A Classed, Gendered and Racialized Phenomenon

Tania Das Gupta

Tania Das Gupta discusses the phenomenon of twice migrated South Asian migrants to Canada, arriving via the Middle East in a two-step migration process. Utilizing a race, gender, and class analysis, Das Gupta discusses the effects transnational migration has on family relationships, work, communities, social citizenship, and identities.


Chapter 2 Maintaining Families Through Transnational Strategies: Examining Chinese Immigrant Women’s Experience in Canada

Guida Man

Guida Man demonstrates how Chinese immigrant women professionals utilize their agencies by devising transnational strategies to accomplish the contradictory demands of their work in the home and in the labour market. She examines how the women’s experiences are embedded in and circumscribed by social, economic, political and cultural processes.

Chapter 3 Intergenerational and Transnational Familyhood in Canada’s Technology Triangle

Amrita Hari

Amrita Hari investigates the strategies skilled migrant-parents from India undertake to deal with the dual transition of settlement and parenthood in Canada. The chapter identifies intergenerational and welfare policy driven strategies which highly skilled transnational parents adopt in order to cope with reproductive obligations and productive career activities.
Chapter 4 Transnational Family Exchanges in Senior Canadian Immigrant Families

Nancy Mandell, Katharine King, Valerie Preston, Natalie Weiser, Ann Kim, and Meg Luxton

Nancy Mandell et al. examine the impact structural features have on seniors’ intimate lives, health and well-being, and relationships with adult children and grandchildren. They conclude that family structures and interactions function both to facilitate and constrain the financial, emotional, and physical well-being of Canadian immigrant seniors.

Part II: Negotiating Transnational Care Work

Chapter 5 Multi-directionality of Care: Transnational Filipino Families and Care Work

Valerie Francisco

Valerie Francisco documents the multi-directionality of care work among transnational families of Filipina women. Francisco illustrates that care work in these families goes in many ways: from migrants to families “left behind,” inside families and kin left behind, and from non-migrant family members to their migrant family members overseas

Chapter 6 Transnationalism and Remittances: The Double-Edged Position of Transmigrant Women Engaged in the Domestic Service Sector

Patience Elabor-Idemudia

Patience Elabor-Idemudia documents how migrant women contribute to the macro-level development of their home countries by enhancing their families and home governments’ revenues through foreign remittances, but at the same time, they confront domination and exploitation. Elabor-Idemudia underscores the racialized and gendered context of migrant women’s experiences.
Chapter 7 Mothering Has No Borders: The Transnational Kinship Networks of Undocumented Jamaican Domestic Workers in Canada

Susan Brigham

Susan Brigham focuses on the experiences of undocumented Black Jamaican women who work as domestic workers in private homes in Canada. The women are single mothers whose children remain in Jamaica. Brigham explores how these women negotiate their transnational space as workers and mothers.
Chapter 8 Transnational Motherhood: Constructing Intergenerational Relations between Filipina Migrant Workers and Their Children

Rina Cohen

Rina Cohen demonstrates how migrant domestic workers in Toronto and their families in the Philippines practice motherhood from afar, thereby redefining the meaning of childcare. Transnational mothers enhance their role as breadwinners and condense their role as face-to-face nurturers, complimenting it with e-mothering and surrogates.
Part III: Constructing Transnational Cultural Identities

Chapter 9 Living Up to Expectations: 1.5 and 2nd Generation Immigrant Students’ Pursuit of University Education

Leanne Taylor and Carl E. James

Leanne Taylor and Carl James present a vivid account of the experiences of 1.5 and 2nd generation transmigrant university students. They argue that career choices and future aspirations are closely linked to these students’ cultural identities through their transnational parents and communities.

Chapter 10 Family, Religion, and the Re-territorialization of Culture within the South Asian Diaspora

Lina Samuel

Lina Samuel illustrates the salience of social history on the formation of diasporic transnational culture. Samuel’s article highlights the importance of religion and family in the formation of transnational identity among the Keralite diaspora in Toronto. Through religious identification, transmigrants forge strong social, economic, and cultural ties with their home country.
Chapter 11 Transnational Activism: An Asian Canadian Case

Xiaoping Li

Xiaoping Li documents an Asian-Canadian grassroots youth movement in the 1970s which undertook community-building, anti-racism, and constructing new identity categories such as the “Asian Canadian.” Li contends that the new ethnic identities were products of transnational political engagements and highlights the need for transnational studies to go beyond its current conceptual parameters

Part IV: Contesting Hegemonic Discourses and Reshaping Transnational Social Spaces

Chapter 12 Structuring Transnationalism: The Mothering Discourse and the Educational Project

Ann Kim

Ann Kim explains the phenomenon and rise of transnationalism among South Korean families with a focus on how it is facilitated by social reproductive practices based on a gendered division of labour and a shift in the mothering discourse.


Chapter 13
Producing Refugees and Trafficked Persons: Women, Unaccompanied Minors and Discourses of Criminalized Victimhood

Hijin Park

Hijin Park discusses how the narratives of criminality and victimhood that surround refugee determination are largely tied to gendered and ageist colonial and imperial discourses.
Chapter 14 Field Correspondence: Exploring the Roots of the Transnational Habitus

Christine Hughes

Christine Hughes argues that while migrants’ habitus (lifestyle, values, dispositions, or expectations) plays a central role in reproducing gender, age, ethnicity, and class differentiations, the application of this concept to transmigrants only may undermine the probable likelihood of the development of a transnational habitus and practice among non-migrants.
Chapter 15 Migrant Networks: Peruvian Women (Re)Shaping Social Spaces in Madrid

Felipe Rubio

Felipe Rubio's chapter on Peruvian ‘mestiza’ (mixed) and ‘andina’ (indigenous) communities in Madrid is an excellent example of how transmigrant habitus reinforce racial inequality in the destination transnational space.

Table of Contents

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  1. Cover
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  1. Title, Copyright, and Dedication
  2. pp. i-vi
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  1. Contents
  2. pp. vii-x
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  1. Acknowledgements
  2. pp. xi-xii
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  1. Introduction: Engendering Transnational Voices
  2. Rina Cohen, Guida Man
  3. pp. 1-14
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  1. PART I: EXPERIENCING TRANSNATIONAL FAMILY LIVES
  1. 1 Gulf Husbands and Canadian Wives: Transnationalism from Below among South Asians – A Classed, Gendered, and Racialized Phenomenon
  2. Tania Das Gupta
  3. pp. 17-32
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  1. 2 Maintaining Families Through Transnational Strategies: The Experience of Mainland Chinese Immigrant Women in Canada
  2. Guida Man
  3. pp. 33-52
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  1. 3 Intergenerational and Transnational Familyhood in Canada’s Technology Triangle
  2. Amrita Hari
  3. pp. 53-74
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  1. 4 Transnational Family Exchanges in Senior Canadian Immigrant Families
  2. Nancy Mandell, Katherine King, Valerie Prestion, Natalie Weiser, Ann Kim, Meg Luxton
  3. pp. 75-96
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  1. PART II: NEGOTIATING TRANSNATIONAL CARE WORK
  1. 5 Multidirectional Care in Filipino Transnational Families
  2. Valerie Fracisco
  3. pp. 99-116
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  1. 6 Transnationalism and Remittances: The Double-edged Position of Transmigrant Women Engaged in the Domestic Service Sector
  2. Patience Elebor-Idemudia
  3. pp. 117-134
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  1. 7 Mothering Has No Borders: The Transnational Kinship Networks of Undocumented Jamaican Domestic Workers in Canada
  2. Susan M. Brigham
  3. pp. 135-154
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  1. 8 Transnational Motherhood: Constructing Intergenerational Relations Between Filipina Migrant Workers and Their Children
  2. Rina Cohen
  3. pp. 155-172
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  1. PART III: CONSTRUCTING TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL IDENTITIES
  1. 9 Living Up to Expectations: 2nd and 1.5-Generation Students’ Pursuit of University Education
  2. Leanne Taylor, Carl E. James
  3. pp. 175-192
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  1. 10 Family, Religion, and the Re-territorialization of Culture Within the South Asian Diaspora
  2. Lina Samuel
  3. pp. 193-212
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  1. 11 Transnational Activism: An Asian Canadian Case
  2. Xiaping Li
  3. pp. 213-232
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  1. PART IV: CONTESTING HEGEMONIC DISCOURSES AND RESHAPING TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL SPACES
  1. 12 Structuring Transnationalism: Mothering and the Educational Project
  2. Ann H. Kim
  3. pp. 235-254
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  1. 13 Producing Refugees and Trafficked Persons: Women, Unaccompanied Minors, and Discourses of Criminalized Victimhood
  2. Hijin Park
  3. pp. 255-272
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  1. 14 Field Correspondence: Exploring the Roots of the Transnational Habitus
  2. Christine Huges
  3. pp. 273-294
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  1. 15 Migrant Networks: Peruvian Women (Re)Shaping Social Spaces in Madrid
  2. Felipe Rubio
  3. pp. 295-314
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  1. Contributors
  2. pp. 315-320
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  1. Index
  2. pp. 321-344
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