Gender, culture and work in global cities ...

Women's Studies International Forum 36 (2013) 1–4

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Gender, culture and work in global cities: Researching ‘transnational’ women☆

Introduction: Researching ‘transnational’ women In the present time international migrants make up 3% of the world population (Castles, 2010). But in a rapidly growing population, this means more than 200 million migrants, with the numbers forecast to grow substantially in the coming years (International Organization for Migration, 2010). The majority of these migrants are mobile for employment-related purposes, ranging from low-skilled, seasonal and domestic work to the more recent movement of highly skilled professionals, increasingly sought in advanced developed economies (Hugo, 2006). A number of authors have noted the increasing ‘feminization’ of migration flows (Cuban, 2010; Ho, 2006; Piper, 2008), with women increasingly outnumbering men in international mobility. The complexity of immigration flows, which encompass people's permanent, temporary and transitional mobilities, has expanded significantly, with increasing recognition that migration is a multifaceted phenomenon with often contradictory impacts on those who migrate and those who do not (Mahler & Pessar, 2001) Gender is crucially involved in the ways in which migrants are afforded or denied opportunities, the prerogatives of citizenship within both host and destination countries, as well as in communities, families and homes. As Piper (2008) notes, feminized migration flows are both gendered and stratified. They include women in domestic and care work, as well as in the entertainment and sex industries, women who are trafficked, those who marry internationally, who are escaping abuse or conflict, and increasingly more highly skilled women. This special issue on Gender, culture and work in global cities: Researching ‘transnational’ women brings together a cross-national and cross-disciplinary set of authors and case studies of transnational migrant women, seeking to provide new understandings of how gender, race, ethnicity, and class operate in migrant women experiences within diverse educational and work spaces in a variety of ‘global cities’ across the world (Sassen, 2000). The special issue takes on the interplay of ☆ SPECIAL JOURNAL ISSUE WOMEN'S STUDIES INTERNATIONAL FORUM. 0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2012.10.009

transnational identities, cultures, bodies and (divisions of) labor in drawing on the experiences of migrant women living in Stockholm (Sweden), Ottawa (Canada), London (UK), Melbourne (Australia), Singapore, Johannesburg (South Africa), and Seoul (South Korea). Eight case studies of transnational women in the workforce are presented: Migrant domestic workers in Sweden (Gavanas); South Asian diasporic women in Canada (Rajiva); Asian and African Caribbean professional women in England (Mirza); Malaysian ‘ethnic’ women in the Australian education sector (Joseph); Swedish expatriate women as ‘trailing spouses’ in Singapore (Lundström); British working women in South Africa (Leonard); Migrant women in globalized academia (Mählck) and Korean American working women in Seoul (Lee). Drawing on postcolonial theories, transnational/migration studies and critical race and whiteness studies, the authors discuss migrant women's diverse positions within these economic and cultural hubs where postcolonial relations and belonging are negotiated through a variety of power structures, “contact zones” and legacies of empires (Pratt, 1992). The collection of articles focuses on the organizational and institutionalized expressions of transnational women's lives, work and identities in global cities, many of which have undergone vast economic and social transformations in recent years — yet being located within the intersections of colonial legacies, traditionalism, nationalism and globalization. Looking at the ways in which migrant women negotiate gender and race/ethnic politics transnationally and translocally, the authors in this collection explore transnational processes “from below”, and how social divisions are mutually constitutive in these processes.

Understanding transnationalism The term transnationalism has indeed been used to designate various global processes. Grewal and Kaplan (2001) discuss how the concept has been used in different periods. Transnationalism has in their overview been used a) to theorize migration as a transnational process, b) to signal the demise or irrelevance of the nation-state in the current phase of globalization, c) as a

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Gender, culture and work in global cities: Researching ‘transnational’ women

synonym for diasporic, d) to designate a form of neocolonialism, and e) to the NGO-ization of social movements. Mahler and Pessar (2006) date the development of a transnational approach to migration to the end of the 1980s, marking a break with earlier approaches that focused on assimilation. A transnational approach considered the ways in which migrants retained ties to their country of origin once settled in their country of destination. A genealogy of transnationalism as an approach is provided by Briggs, McCormick, and Way (2008). The development and spread of the globalization discourse from the later 1980s, which focused on the apparent decline of the nation-state and the growth of transnational connections, appeared to incorporate transnationalism and mobility as aspects of the one phenomenon (Mendoza, 2002). Mahler and Pessar (2001) differentiate between the two, considering transnational migration as occurring in “transnational spaces/contexts” which ‘however are “clearly grounded” in specific sites and locations’, where nations remain powerful. For Lawson (2000), it is this grounding in ‘multiple sites’ (emphasis in the original) and the impact on migrants of movements within and between these that are critical to understanding the ‘processes of belonging, exclusion and affiliation that are produced’. To adopt a transnational approach is to examine not only the everyday experiences of migrants across different sites but also their location and the forces which both enable and constrain them (Yeoh, 2005). Yet scholars working within a transnational approach to migration do not regard the conception as settled (Yeoh, Willis, & Fakhri, 2003). Mendoza (2002) argues that: feminist transnational postcolonial studies have been able to call into question and destabilize the boundaries of nation, race, gender and sexuality that were built into earlier feminist internationalist and globalist theories … They have made possible the analysis of gender, race and sexuality beyond the conﬁnement of national borders and generated the necessary spaces to establish the connections between women of different nations and cultures, but also of different feminisms. (p. 302) Kofman (2004) describes transnationalism as one of several integrative approaches to the study of migration, which aims to forge a connection between the decisions of individuals and the structures within which they make and carry out those decisions. She further argues that these political, economic and cultural processes are shaped by the policies and institutional practices of states. Many scholars working from within a transnational perspective thus focus their investigation at an individual, household or network level, making connections with the structures people must negotiate. Other scholars draw attention to earlier conceptions of transnationalism, drawing on celebratory accounts of globalization, which lauded its potential for migrants, and instead investigating the very different situations. Levitt and Jaworsky (2007) in a review of transnationalism as it is employed in the study of migration note a shift in emphasis by scholars to an understanding of transnationalism as it is experienced in the fluid social spaces through which migrants remake their lives and identities. They point out that experiences vary considerably depending on class

backgrounds and the opportunities, constraints and barriers which are afforded or imposed by different nations. Nations are part of a global hierarchy, meaning that migrants' class positions can translate in often unexpected ways. They suggest that ‘a major research task…is to specify the types and dimensions of different kinds of social fields and their effects on migrant trajectories…a second and related task is to delineate how various kinds of social fields intersect with class, race, nationality, and gender’ (p. 144). Scholars have also focused on identity formation and identity politics in transnational social spaces. Transnational identities, while fluid and flexible, are also at the same time grounded in particular places at particular times (Yeoh et al., 2003). Because transnationals move across countries and must negotiate varied conditions, ‘their identities, behavior and values are not limited by location and instead they construct and utilize flexible personal and national identities’ (Yeoh et al., 2003). Evans and Bowlby (2000), for instance, explore the ways in which experiences in the workforce changed migrant women's identities in the UK creating new gendered and racialized identities out of the juxtaposition of two different “gender regimes” (Walby, 1997). At the same time, class and educational levels were also important in the way these women saw themselves and the opportunities open to them. Their identity as belonging to their country of origin or their religion was often strengthened by these experiences, but they adopted elements of a new identity from their country of destination which permitted different possibilities (Evans & Bowlby, 2000). The renegotiation and continuing construction of identity are therefore intrinsic to migration. Migrant women are crossing boundaries of class, ethnicity and society which also interact with gender in a number of ways, and are forced to re-evaluate themselves in a new society as well as learn to adapt or resist to the new constructs that are forced upon them. Drawing upon this knowledge, we wish to go beyond what has been termed methodological nationalism. This is done by exploring how “the transnationalization of social inequality” (Weiss, 2005), is reflected through connections that go beyond the nation/the local since these social divisions intersect at different levels: local, national and transnational (e.g. workers, labor legislation, or transnational companies). However, while this special issue looks at inequalities outside the national frame, we do find a necessary critique towards the use of transnationalism, referring to its celebratory view on “borderlessness”. Besides the structural and institutional processes at local, national and transnational levels and the micro-politics of contestation, the kind of transnational labor performed by women locally, nationally or across borders and enabled by the increasing and deepening globalization that shapes migrant women's sense of belonging and identities in distinct ways. Processes of maneuvering and contestations migrant women engage in complicate the interplay and/or division between local/global, traditional/modern, identity/difference and national/transnational (Connell, 2007). Transnational asymmetries In this collection of articles, we highlight the global asymmetries tied to the concept of transnationalism, by discussing the hierarchical locations of nation states and


migrants embedded into transnational analyses, and investigating how these are reflected, played out and negotiated in the local sphere (in the household, the labor market, etc.). Analytically, we argue for the need to understanding how national boundaries and borders continue to structure and organize resources, capital, belonging, labor and citizenship. In line with Briggs et al. (2008: 627) we believe that ‘“transnationalism” can do to the nation what gender did for sexed bodies: provide the conceptual acid that denaturalizes all their deployments, compelling us to acknowledge that the nation, like sex, is a thing contested, interrupted, and always shot through with contradiction’. Briggs et al. (2008) further argue that feminist theory offers ‘a useful analogy for ways of theorizing the transnational’ (p 637) and that ‘economics, politics, subjectification, and the family’ all exceed the nation, and offer points of entry into transnational analysis. ‘Race is another example’ (p. 642). Asis, Piper, and Raghuram (2010) point out that new conditions and ever tighter governmental regulation can mean that ‘transnationalism may be the tactic of the dispossessed’ (p. 94). Feminist geographers (McDowell, 2008; Yeoh et al., 2003) argue that migrants' identities operate in conjunction with labor markets, regional wage differentials and legal and juridical regulations to produce particular migration patterns, meanings and experiences. Contemporary transnational migration is, as pointed out in this special issue, highly differentiated by class, gender, race, whiteness, ethnicity, generation, region, religion, and nationality as well as the political and economic circumstance of migration within the same migrating “nationality” or “ethnicity”, as in the case of return migration (Lee), within a single global city as in the case of expats and domestic workers in Singapore (Lundström), or in the same labor market where some migrants are marginalized in the informalized sector, yet subsidized by the formal economy (Gavanas). Using global cities as a framework for migration hubs, the case studies presented here are placed in relation to global economic structures and the transnational division of labor (Sassen, 2000). In this sense, we focus on the practices that constitute and materialize globalization, pointing at ‘transnational women's’ different positions vis-à-vis these processes and sometimes vis-à-vis each other. What aspects of transnational migration are visible in the power-geometry of everyday life of migrant women? As the collection of articles show, transnational experiences can be empowering as well as disempowering, liberating as well as exploitative, and transforming as well as reinforcing difference and inequalities (McDowell, 2008; Silvey, 2004). Transnational migrant identities for women are therefore constituted through a range of intersecting, sometimes competing, forces and processes. Thus, this collection of articles present a complex view on “transnational women”, who are located within dynamic processes, practices, structures and discourses (linked to both privilege and oppression, national borders and transnational links) rather than reflecting static interconnections. Resources are determined in relation to both national and transnational spaces. What could be nationally recognized as capital might not be transnationally recognized. Yet, class and racial inequality are shaping transnational relations and are being shaped by current transnational changes, defining and defined by citizenship,

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mobility, access to spaces, welfare states and other resources (Weiss, 2005). Transnational women in ‘global cities’ The eight case studies strive to understand: How do ‘transnational women’ negotiate work, employment, body and culture in the new global occupational spaces given the important backdrop of postcolonial histories, culture, nationalism and global social forces (such as the global economy and consumer culture)? How are they engaging with issues related to work and life-long learning in the globalized economy and labor market? What are the cultural and educational resources that they draw on in their workspaces? What are the cultural, racial, ethnic, class and work barriers these women negotiate in redefining their social locations and occupational boundaries? Discourses of knowledge economy, neo-liberalism and globalization have transformed work practices and politics. Flexibilization and precariousness in the work force, and intensified accountability regimes have complicated the ways in which contemporary migrant women in global cities negotiate personal and collective agency, and local and global imperatives within their new cultural and work spaces. The edited collection focuses on the manifold of ways in which migrant women negotiate cultural collectives, national ideologies and global imperatives within and across cultural, knowledge and skills barriers. It provides empirically based case studies on the gendered, classed, ethnic and racialized divisions that continue to structure transnational women's lives, and their multiple translocations. As the articles shows, while playing prominent roles in the work force and global economy, transmigrant women in these societies also juggle various positions of wife, mother, daughter, and employer, as members of racialized, cultural, ethnic or national collectives. The division of (reproductive) labor is discussed from different angles in Catrin Lundströms' and Anna Gavanas' study. Whereas Gavanas' study shows how gendered and racialized divisions structure migrant domestic worker's lives in Stockholm, Lundström discusses how “domestic spaces” are transnational, yet intimate, “contact zone” between Swedish expat wives and domestic workers in Singapore. In her article on girls and women of South Asian descent, Mythili Rajiva highlights the intergenerational nature of class status, social mobility and occupational identity and how they, while benefiting from Canadian education and training, are often haunted by familial narratives of discrimination. These altered positions call for an on-going process of negotiating, navigating, interpreting and reworking social locations and their meanings through cultural, educational and global discourses mediated subjectively, faced by migrants depending on their ethnicity, gender and class (Yeoh & Willis, 2005). By examining return migration among Korean American women in Seoul, Helene Lee captures the gendered dimensions of transnational ethnicities. Through an examination of the messages around desirable normative femininity, the article looks at the ways Korean American women become “gendered outsiders” within the context of the South Korean workplace. Within the Canadian South Asian diaspora, family/work dynamics Cynthia Joseph shows how Malaysian and Singaporean women draw on multiple educational and cultural resources in the (re)making of their identities as transnational women. Focusing on the

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embodied nature of migration, Heidi Mirza uses the black feminist framework of ‘embodied intersectionality’ to trace the narrative constructions of ethicized young women as they negotiate structures of dominance and power in their bid to ‘belong’ in a postcolonial, transglobal, multicultural Britain. Through interviews with highly skilled migrant women in Swedish academia, Paula Mählck develops the topic of race and body, examining the gendered, classed and racialized dimensions continue to structure the embodied idea(l) of “good research” in Swedish globalized higher education and research policy. Pauline Leonard problematizes the notion of whiteness, drawing on the working lives of British expatriate women in South Africa. From the different case studies, this special issue strives to provide new insights on the complexities of ‘transnational women's’ diverse positions and the contemporary processes of transnationalism and migration. References Asis, Maruja, Piper, Nicolia, & Raghuram, Parvati (2010). International migration and development in Asia: Exploring knowledge frameworks. International Migration, 48(3), 76–106. Briggs, Laura, McCormick, Gladys, & Way, John (2008). Transnationalism: A category of analysis. American Quarterly, 60(3), 625–648. Castles, Stephen (2010). Understanding global migration: A social transformation perspective. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36(10), 1565–1586. Connell, Raewyn (2007). Southern theory. The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Cuban, Sandra (2010). Examining the feminisation of migration concept for adult education. Gender and Education, 22(2), 177–191. Evans, Sally Lloyd, & Bowlby, Sophia (2000). Crossing boundaries: Racialised gendering and the labour market experiences of Pakistani migrant women in Britain. Women's Studies International Forum, 23(4), 461–474. Grewal, Inderpal, & Kaplan, Caren (2001). Global identities: Theorizing transnational studies of sexuality. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 7, 663–679. Ho, Christina (2006). Migration as feminisation? Chinese women's experiences of work and family in Australia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32(3), 497–514. Hugo, Graeme (2006). Globalization and changes in Australian international migration. Journal of Population Research, 23(2), 107–134. International Organization for Migration (2010). World migration report 2010. The future of migration: Building capacities for change. Geneva: International Organization for Migration.

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Cynthia Joseph Faculty of Education, Monash University, Victoria, Australia Catrin Lundström Culture Studies, Linköping University, Sweden