Guida Man and Rina Cohen, Eds.: Engendering Transnational Voices: Studies in Family, Work and Identity

Guida Man and Rina Cohen, eds. Engendering Transnational Voices: Studies in Family, Work and Identity. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015. 353 pp. Introduction plus 15 chapters. Author bios. Index. $32.24 sc. 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 (Chi, 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. …