Migration has always had the potential to challenge established spatial images. It highlights the social nature of spaces as something created and reproduced through collective human agency, and, in so doing, reminds us
that, within the limits imposed by power, existing spatial arrangements are always susceptible to change. (Rouse, 2001: 159) Despite approximately three decades of significant contributions to understanding numerous aspects of the migration experience, feminist migration research still lies largely outside mainstream migration studies (Nawyn, 2010: 749). Accordingly, the goal of this work is to contribute to efforts to ‘engender migration studies’ (Pessar, 1999) or to incorporate gender analysis in migration studies. Specifically, the paper considers how Mexican men and women’s embodied experiences of migration are negotiated through complex and paradoxical ‘gendered geographies of power’ (Mahler & Pessar, 2001). Transnationalism has proven to be a productive analytical framework from which to examine contemporary global migration, where transnationalism is understood to denote ‘multi-stranded’ social relations linking societies of origin and settlement (Basch et al., 1994) or ‘the ways in which migrants are intimately and intricately involved in social, political and economic networks that stretch across national boundaries’ (Gilmartin, 2008: 1841). A transnational perspective, then, ‘emphasizes the blurring of social space and geographic space’ (Yeates, 2011: 1113), as migration can imply ongoing and simultaneous relations between countries of origin and settlement.
Notably, however, the ways in which transnational migration is gendered is an area that has not received sufficient attention (Levitt et al., 2003: 569). Mahler and Pessar (2001: 441) point out that ‘gender has rarely been a principal focus of studies on transnational spaces and processes, including transnational migration’. Indeed, the analytic of gender has historically been sidelined in scholarly research on international migration and within the transnational
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framework (Donato et al., 2006; Lutz, 2010; Mahler & Pessar, 2006; Nawyn, 2010; Pessar & Mahler, 2003). As a corrective scholars have sought to ‘engender migration studies’ (Pessar, 1999), pushing ‘gender from the margins to the core’ (Mahler & Pessar, 2006). These efforts have enriched scholarly research on migration in two important ways: 1) by bringing female migration into the forefront of migration studies, and 2) in facilitating a shift from an additive approach (i.e. studies that include gender as a dichotomous variable or simply women-centred research) toward a more sophisticated analysis (Donato et al., 2006; Nawyn, 2010; Piper, 2005) where gender is understood as a ‘key constitutive element’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2003: 9) of migration processes.
Building on the burgeoning literature of gender and transnationalism, this article considers migration through a gender framework that seeks to map out the ‘gendered geographies of power’ (Mahler & Pessar, 2001). My treatment of gender reflects my understanding of gender as relational and fluid: a construct that is always negotiated and mediated across diverse contexts (Connell, 2009; Kimmel, 2000). The first section of the article provides a brief overview of my methodological orientation. The next section reviews relevant literature to ‘bring gender into an even tighter transnational focus’ (Pessar & Mahler, 2003: 812). Next, drawing on the analytical construct of ‘social location’ (Pessar & Mahler, 2003) I consider Mexican women and men’s embodied narratives of migration to Canada, illustrating how migration produces shifting transnational articulations of gender. Eschewing a simplistic male versus female comparison, my analysis of gender as relational and as spatially and temporally contextual points to the ways in which migrants’ experiences are mediated and shaped by dynamic and intersecting geographies of ‘difference’ in heeding calls to focus on gender and not women (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Cranford, 2006; Moch, 2005) and by integrating feminist conceptions of gender the research advances the agenda of feminist migration scholarship.
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METHODOLOGY
The findings for this article are drawn from my doctoral research: conducted between August 2008 and March 2009 on Mexican transnational migration. The research broadly explores ‘embodied transnationalism’ (Dunn, 2010) for Mexican migrants in Canada, which foregrounds the affective, banal and everyday characteristics of transnational mobility. To this end, I conducted in-depth interviews, lasting from one to one-and-a-half hours, with 30 Mexican migrants residing in Southwestern Ontario—10 male migrant workers, who migrate to Ontario annually for seasonal employment in the agricultural sector under Canada’s long-standing Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), and 20 immigrants (10 females and 10 males), who have obtained Canadian citizenship or are attempting to obtain permanent resident status in Canada. Interviews were supplemented by participant observation (i.e. I attended birthday parties, Spanish Catholic masses, Mexican community events, visited sites such as restaurants and stores frequented by Mexican migrants etc) and many informal discussions and interactions with key community stakeholders (i.e. persons who work with or volunteer with Mexican migrant workers and/or Mexican immigrants on a regular basis).
Mexican migrant men and women were recruited to participate in my research through snowball sampling with referrals beginning with personal networks and friends in the area. To protect the anonymity of research participants I have created pseudonyms throughout and omitted identifying details. The majority of interviews were conducted in English, except in cases where research participants preferred Spanish, in which case a translator was used. Interviews conducted in Spanish were translated to English with the aid of a bilingual research assistant. All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim in English in order to facilitate in-depth analysis. Field notes were kept in order to record the essential themes transmitted in interviews, and to detail contextual features of each interview.
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Given that ‘the decision to migrate and the opportunities that facilitate migration are often nested in household arrangements’ (Nawyn, 2010: 754) it is important to provide some additional information about the composition of my sample: all of the female immigrants I interviewed were married with children, with the exception of one woman who was married but did not have children. There was less uniformity among the ten immigrant men interviewed. This group was composed of six married men with children, two married men without children and two single men. All of the migrant worker participants were married with children. A profile that reflects the stipulations for participation in the SAWP requires migrant workers to:
enter the country as single applicants but must demonstrate that they support families in their home countries. Preference in recruitment is biased toward married workers to deter them from attempting to secure permanent residency through marriage or seeking to remain illegally (Preibisch, 2007: 101).
In effect, the state is intentionally creating and regulating transnational affective bonds as an instrument of labour policy. Of the total sample of thirty research participants, then, twenty-five were married with children (four of which represent two married couples), three were married without children and two were single. Notably, given my wider interest in ‘embodied transnationalism’ (Dunn, 2010), specifically the ‘emotional terrain of transnationality’ (Boehm & Swank, 2011), the interviews sourced in this article reflect participants’ candour about their migration experiences, speaking at length about the challenges of negotiating their lives across transnational spaces. While all interviews in my study explored the role of emotions in the transnational migration experience, my primary data for this article draws on the literature of gender and transnationalism in order to explore the ways in which gender is negotiated and reconstituted through and as a consequence of migration.