All in the Family: Gender, Transnational Migration, and the Nation-State

Over the years, feminist scholarship has illuminated the ways in which genders are differentiated and gender hierarchies are constituted as part of the way women and men learn to identify with a nation-state. Much less has been said about the social reproduction of gender in transnational spaces. These spaces are created as people emigrate, settle far from their homelands, and yet develop networks of connection that maintain familial, economic, religious, and political ties to those homelands. The task of this paper is to begin to explore the ways in which gender and nation are mutually constituted within the transnational social fields that link homeland and new land. This paper is exploratory, using a case study of Haitian transnational connections as a catalyst for future investigation.