Engendering Transnational Voices: Studies in Family, Work and Identity ed. by Guida Man, and Rina Cohen (review)

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the transnational framework has come to dominate the field of migration studies. Some have argued that the term “transnational migrant” is now applied so generally to all migrants that its use in research has become unhelpful. To address this problem, the present book focuses specifically on women migrants who develop and lead deeply transnational lives. These are women migrants who work abroad to support their children, husbands, and aging parents who remain behind, yet in close contact by phone, internet and exchanges of emotional and material support.

The book begins with a helpful introduction to the field of research along with an overview of the four parts of the book and comments on the feminist-gendered lens and social justice perspectives that run through the chapters.

Part 1 examines well-educated immigrant women. It is often assumed that women migrants with less schooling rely more on transnational family connections. Yet, this section shows that highly educated female immigrants facing family separations and potential downward occupational mobility on entering gendered and racialized foreign labor markets also rely strongly on their cultural and transnational connections. The evidence comes from women in professional families who had moved to Canada from South Asia after first migrating to the Gulf States (Ch1, by Das Gupta), women in Chinese business immigrant families in Toronto who find their husbands largely away on work travel (Ch2 by Man), women in South Asian immigrant families in Canada where both the husband and wife are professionals struggling with work and child-care issues (Ch3 by Hari), and female migrants from different nations in both the United States and Canada facing challenges of caring for older kin (Ch4 by Mandell, King, Preston, Weiser, Kim and Luxton).

Part 2 probes how work, child-care and kin support issues are addressed by precarious female migrants: domestic workers, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. The cases include: Filipina domestic workers in New York who help one another to find jobs and retain a sense of identity and purpose (Ch5 by Francisco); African women asylum seekers in the Netherlands, who are under threat of deportation while struggling to find work and to send badly needed remittances home (Ch6 by Elabor-Idemudia); the support networks of undocumented Jamaican domestic workers in Canada (C7 by Brigham), and Filipina migrant workers in Canada who succeed in maintaining strong relationships with their children who are being raised by relatives in the Philippines (Ch8 by Cohen). These studies highlight the stress, loneliness and struggles of the women, but also draw attention to their survival skills, sense of self-worth and hopes for the future.

Part 3 explores how transnational cultural identities are constructed and shape lives. The chapters examine how immigrant-origin youth in Canada strategize their university education (Ch9 by Taylor and James), how cultural territorial belonging is formed among South Asians in Canada (Ch10 by Samuel), and how ethnic Japanese and Chinese university students in Vancouver formed transnational activist groups to address “issues that Canadians of Asian descent faced in Canada” (213, Ch11 by Li).

Part 4 explores how female migrant transnational social spaces are defined. The chapters cover: the struggle of Korean mothers who move with their children but without their husbands to Canada for periods of up to several years while their children are schooled (Ch12 by Kim); discourses of criminalized victimhood affecting female migrants, unaccompanied minors, refugees and trafficked persons (Ch13 by Park); the roots of transnational habitus for women migrants from the perspective of Bourdieu’s theory (Ch14 by Hughes), and Peruvian women migrants reshaping social spaces in Madrid (Ch15 by Rubio).

Most chapters focus on Canadian cases. The addition of some comparative cases strengthens the international and comparative standpoint running through the book. The chapters are relatively short (on average 16 pages each), clearly written and free standing, with their own conceptual framework...