Chapter 3 examined the gendered nature of a migrant division of labour. In this chapter we turn to family migration, traditionally associated with women as dependents and followers of men. The term is used to categorise the international movement of people who migrate due to new or established family ties. People moving for family reasons constitute the largest group of migrants entering OECD countries, ahead of labour and humanitarian migration (OECD, 2019). To move for family reasons may encompass an array of different kinds of migration trajectories, from the adoption of a foreign child to family members accompanying migrant workers or refugees, as well as people forming new family units with host country residents or family reunification (when family members reunite with those who migrated previously).

While international migration had traditionally been equated with the movement of men, women were depicted as the followers in what was seen as secondary migration. However, the growth of female labour migrants in domestic work, care work, and nursing, meant that women too became the sponsor of husbands, children, and parents. In the early 2000s, Bryceson and Vuorela (2002) drew attention to transnational families in Europe and countries of origin, leading to the consolidation of family migration as a field, which has burgeoned in the ensuing years.

In this chapter we first outline the growing interest in family migrations, theoretically and in policy terms, which has generally sought to restrict flows and been based on particular gendered representations of family members and women in particular. Recently marriage migration has generated interest, though the area of greatest expansion has been that of transnational families.

4.1 Developing Family Migration

Starting in the late 1980s, theoretical and methodological research on family migration emerged as a subject of scholarly work (Boyd, 1989). The role of the family in internal migration and a number of country case studies of family reunification to the US were published (see International Migration Review, 1977, 1986). In Asia, too, family migrations, and especially marriages, gave rise to articles in the Asia and Pacific Migration Journal (1995, 1999). European research, however, lagged behind as family migration drew less attention than labour migration due to its association with dependency upon a primary migrant, and its majority of women and children. Even so, as labour migration grew in numbers, so too did family migration increase as a result of increasing family reunifications, a trend that also characterises southern European countries since the 1990s (Ambrosini et al., 2014). Hence, over the past two decades, we see consistent growth of publications about family migrations in relation to its different forms, the experiences of different family members, familial strategies, and the formation of transnational families.

While earlier studies focused on countries of destination and often assumed that migrants wished to bring their family members with them, more recent studies take a more nuanced and critical view of migratory processes and question the desire to complete family reunification. Theoretically, studies have adopted a migration systems approach in which all forms of migration (permanent, temporary, circular, return) occur simultaneously. Increasingly, studies are multi-sited and transnational, in which people, services, and cultural and social practices circulate between places, underscoring the interdependency between the mobile and immobile to ensure successful migration outcomes (Bélanger & Silvey, 2019).

Although family-related reasons play a significant role in intra-European migration (depending on the data source), this perspective has been somewhat neglected among researchers. Some of the difficulties of identifying family-related movements arise from the fact that individuals are often not counted as such because they do not hold a residence permit under this category and because restrictions on movement for family reasons do not apply to the same extent for EU nationals. Yet, large-scale migration from Eastern Europe post-EU enlargement in 2004 drew attention to the family strategies deployed by Polish migrants in their migration to and settlement in western Europe and relationships with their homeland (Ryan et al., 2009).

However, it has not only been academic interest in family migration that contributed to the growth of publications and comparative European projects. The Europeanisation of migration policy from Tampere onwards gave rise to the adoption of the Family Reunification Directive 2003/86 EC in 2003 (adopted by all Member States except Denmark, Ireland and the UK). The Directive outlines the minimum rights third-country nationals should have in reuniting with a family member living in an EU member state, but does not address the situations of third-country nationals who are family members of an EU citizen.

The Directive also provides more favourable rules for refugees. It has been progressively adopted over a number of years by old EU states as well as the new enlargement states. The Commission has monitored (2008, 2014, 2019) the implementation of the Directive while the European Migration Network (EMN, 2017) has produced reports on issues and problems regarding family reunification and related issues. In part, concerns about family migration are due to the fact that, for the past 30 years family reunification has been one of the primary drivers of immigration to the EU. In 2017, 472,994 migrants were admitted to the EU-25 on grounds of family reunification, or approximately 28% of all first permits issued to third-country nationals in the EU-25. And although, employment has since 2016 become the main reason for permits due in part to large-scale emigration from the Ukraine, it still accounts for a substantial percentage – in 2019 (Eurostat, 2020).

While earlier research focused on family reunification of migrants and co-ethnic marriages, more recent research has turned to how family migration policies define the acceptable family and permissible intimate relationships which includes a range of family members and familial and kin relationships, but also other affective relationships (e.g., love and marriage, parenting of children, and parental care) (Mai & King, 2009). It should be noted that ‘family’ for the purposes of migration policy was conceptualised as a traditional nuclear family comprised of a married couple and dependent children under 18 years of age.

Migrants benefitting from family migration regulations are expected to demonstrate they have the capacity to be productive, comply with acceptable cultural practices, and not be a burden on the welfare state. The complexity of how family members contribute to the social reproduction of the family tends to be given little attention in the migration literature. Rather, attention is paid to the nuclear family in immigration legislation while the roles of parents and other kin are marginalised (see transnational families below).

The right to family reunification and formation – income, other resources such as housing, integration conditions – has generated inequalities. Family reunification policies are most restrictive in northern countries, as they align the conditions for sponsorship increasingly with economic conditions for labour migration, especially the high-income requirements in a number of countries (Kofman, 2018; Pellander, 2021; Staver, 2015), which has rendered class (see also Chap. 2) more significant in the stratification of access to family life together with gender inequalities.

Marriage migration (D’Aoust 2013) as a separate issue to family reunification is a more recent area of study within family migrations. In Europe, research tended to be focused, initially, on marriages between co-ethnics such as Turks, Moroccans or Pakistanis marrying with someone from their homeland and seen as a problem for integration of the migrant in the receiving society (see Chap. 6). Cross-border marriages between a wider range of nationalities than co-ethnic as a means of migrating legally and acquiring citizenship have begun to receive more attention. Such migrations raise questions about regulation of who belongs and who deserves citizenship (Fresnoza-Flot & Ricordeau, 2017) (see Chap. 6) and has become increasingly politicised (Moret et al., 2021).

Intra-European binational couples have been surprisingly under-studied (De Valk & Medrano, 2014) due in part to the assumption that intra-European mobility is primarily driven by work reasons. However, Migali and Natale (2017) found that familial reasons are nearly as significant as work motivations. For many individuals the movement for familial and intimate reasons represented a second mobility, following an initial move for education or work (Gaspar, 2012). Having the privilege of EU citizenship and free movement rights, couples do not have to marry, but may cohabit. However, same sex marriages are only recognised and performed in some northern, western and southern European states (16 states as of July 2020). A few others, such as Croatia and Hungary, also recognise same sex partnerships.

In the next section, we turn to the growing interest in transnational families as the outcome of large-scale migrations, some of which have permitted the reconstitution of the family in one place, whilst others have led to separated families, especially amongst those who do not meet the requirements for crossing borders or fulfilling integration criteria (see Chap. 6).

4.2 Transnational Families: Concepts, Generations, Relations

As a historical phenomenon of social organisation under globalisation and an inevitable result of migration, the emergence of transnational families marks the development of ‘familyhood’ relations (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002) across national borders. Transnational familyhood offers the opportunity to negotiate family life through intersecting individual and familial objectives but with structural constraints as crucial as mobile opportunities can possibly become (Fesenmyer, 2014). Transnational families are also organised under the rubric of sustained familial ties, kinship networks and fluid relations spanning two or multiple nation states. There is a clear realisation here that migration and other kinds of mobilities are not unidirectional and do not focus on permanency of settlement and relocation with a country of destination as the core objective. The more crucial realisation is that under such arrangements of long-distance transnational familyhood, the maintenance of familial connections, kinship feelings, collective belonging to a family unit with notions of shared welfare, shared responsibilities, caring arrangements, participation in social reproduction and group consumption are all part and parcel of such relations (McCarthy & Edwards, 2011).

As Bryceson (2019: 2) confirms: ‘transnational families are not new but they are definitely more numerous now than ever before. They are an evolving institutional form of human interdependence, which serve material and emotional needs, in the twenty-first century’s globalising world. The transnational family constitutes a multi-dimensional spatial and temporal support environment for migrants, as well as providing motivational impetus for migration’. The breadth and depth of family relations will fluctuate according to the specific needs, be that economic or emotional, as will the strategic incentive to extend the social networks within or beyond the ethnocultural or religious parameters that might define the boundaries of the group. It is then obvious that the concept of ‘transnational familyhood’ is framed around how borders are perceived, understood, experienced, negotiated and socially constructed by migrants.

Individual migrants and their families don’t just navigate psychic and emotional borders in their mobile lives or in pursuit of settlement. They frequently contend with a number of logistical, legal, bureaucratic and pragmatic ‘border-crossings’ such as residency, citizenship, immigration and labour policies etc. often in the midst of sudden geopolitical shocks and wider global turbulences. Their circumstances might give navigational direction but the wider global scope engulfing their acts and actions is what inherently defines most outcomes. As Bryceson (ibid) argues: ‘Since the turn of the millennium, a tendency for transition from blurred to brittle borders has gained momentum in the European Union and North America. ‘Blurred borders’ refer to migrants’ low risk border crossings and light regulation of their visits, affording relative openness to migrants seeking legal residence and citizenship in the receiving countries. ‘Brittle borders’ represent the opposite, involving physically and legally hazardous crossings with enforcement of stringent restrictions on temporary as well as permanent residence and remote possibility or impossibility of migrants gaining citizenship or family reunification’.

Transnational families might seek to secure their immigration status and citizenship in the destination country, or, they might further enhance affective locational nodes with the ancestral homeland or the country of origin. However, there is a third way in the option of maintaining both a new livelihood niche setting in the country of destination while also continuing the exchanges and family dynamic communications back ‘home’. A variety of factors (e.g. class, educational capital, networks etc.) might shape the prioritisation of the children’s educational and cultural integration in the destination country and as a result more ‘hybridised’ transnational identities might emerge for the offspring and subsequent generations.

Generations are also integral to understanding dynamics, constraints and opportunities for transnational families. Before we disentangle the concept of ‘generation’, it is important to clarify that within the varying typologies of the ‘migrant’ category, transnational families do evolve. That is, be it economic or irregular migrants and refugees or the more privileged status of highly skilled mobile professionals or scientific and student migration, transnational familyhood becomes relatively central among those groups when it comes to motivations with regard to settlement, employment or potentially return. All indicative migrant categories above might compete for welfare and employment opportunities but also face similar dilemmas as regards their potential settlement or return migration. Additionally, some of the drivers shaping their trajectory might be similar, such as experiences of racism, exclusion, discrimination as regards housing, work and other social encounters. In the case of those envisaging returning to their country of origin, often, the maintenance of transnational ties becomes strategically useful in keeping aware of the political, social and economic situation in the sending country. As a result, the propensity, intensity and desire for transnational engagement can only be fully understood in the context of each national group and geographic context (Bloch & Hirsch, 2018; Carling & Pettersen, 2014).

A similar kind of fluidity exists when we try to operationalise the concept of ‘generation’. As a migration chronotope, a spatially and temporally situated phenomenology, and, the ontological, imaginary and state policy parameters within which we emplace genaeologies, the concept of ‘generation’ is multidimensional and complex (King & Christou, 2010; Christou & King, 2015). That is, ‘generation’ is not simply a matter of linear, temporal and geographic origins that have a neat trajectory from the zero, first, to second and subsequent generations. The evolving identities of those offspring born in the country of destination are even further challenged by the ‘tyranny of ethnic consciousness’ of each parent, the family context experiences, their schooling and of course their own sense of agency and belonging. As a result, we slip into more complicated percentages when beyond ‘first’ and ‘second’ generation migrants we talk about the 1.25; 1.5; 1.75 (Portes & Rumbaut, 2006) or even 2.5 generations (Ramakrishnan, 2004) mostly in the US literature but with increasing interest in the rest of the international literature (Safi, 2018).

One alternative way to move beyond the chronotype limitations of confining groups to ‘generations’ is to utilise the concept of ‘cohort’ in conceptualising the succession of migrant waves as ‘diasporic’ (Berg, 2011) but also sociologically in terms of genealogical spheres of historical contexts and group accounts (Kertzer, 1983). The generational element is also integral to contemporary research on transnational grand-parenting in the digital age (Nedelcu, 2017; Janta & Christou, 2019) in understanding the role of the ‘zero generation’, in this case being the grandparents, who although might not have migrated do engage in transnational grand-parenting (Nedelcu, 2017). Here, the dynamics of transnationalism become enmeshed with multiple modalities, not only three generational relations (parents, children, grandparents) but also implications of technologically mediated co-presence, leisure travel and hosting in shaping new social practices. Transnational family practices in the digital age are shaped by new media and polymedia regimes which in a sense reinvent social reproduction practices (Madianou & Miller, 2012; Baldassar et al., 2016). This kind of ‘cyber-transnationalism’ with its digital webs of connectedness defines new intra and inter-generational possibilities of collaboration and conflict. The motivation however remains to maximise contact and in the case of transnational grand-parenting to enhance caring circuits. We will revisit this aspect of generations as regards parenting, ageing and caring in the next two sections that follow.

However, beyond the digital context, affective negotiations remain intact, as even in the case of digital transnational relations, elements of disagreement and tensions render dysfunctionality as a normalising aspect of transnational communication for families. This way ‘doing family’ (Christou & Michail, 2015) and ‘doing caring’ transnationally (Baldassar, 2014) is subject to mainstream normalising processes of emotional labour and relational negotiations.

At the same time, while the strategic reference for migration is often perceived as individualistic in its motivation and execution, both motives and outcomes are frequently linked to the family. The scope and dynamics of parenting as well as the impact on childhoods is inextricably linked to the context of such which in the case of transnational migration poses additional challenges. In the next section, we cover some of the core themes emerging in the literature on family studies of transnational parenting.

4.3 Transnational Parenting and Childhood

The proliferation of studies on transnational families from a variety of inter/disciplinary perspectives over the past two decades (Zontini, 2010; Carling et al., 2012; Menchavez-Francisco, 2018) might have engaged with the wider topic of transnational familyhood but less frequently with gendered impacts on the emotional well-being of parents and children (Jordan et al., 2018; Caarls et al., 2018).

It has been observed that ‘a relatively neglected trigger of migrants’ transnational involvement is their position in the life course and, at a macro level, the stage of a migration cycle they belong to’ (Boccagni, 2012: 42). Parenting and grand-parenting can be considered as roles pivotal to both the life course and the migration cycle that migrants experience. Empirical studies focusing on transnational (grand) parenting practices help us understand transnational families as a ‘living strategy’ (Kofman, 2019) relevant to a broader spectrum of transnational sociologies of the family. Moreover, the focus on how family migration can be disruptive to gender roles (ibid) illuminates new directions for the study of gender and migration.

Family relations transnationally are both complex and fluid especially when it comes to young people and those in a vulnerable context such as unaccompanied asylum-seeking youth (Devenney, 2020). However, an additional layer of analysis observed in this body of works is that of perceiving unaccompanied children and young migrants as victims and by extension using language mirroring saviour mentality and saving mechanisms. These migrants are perceived primarily in terms of their physical dislocation from family members (in legal terms the status of ‘unaccompanied’ is framed that way) and by extension have focused on their sense of loneliness, trauma, separation, vulnerability, victimhood, fragility, passivity and neediness (Herz & Lalander, 2017; Devenney, 2020). As a result, the wider discourse of ‘saviour social institutions’ readily aware of their role in stepping in to rescue youth who are seen as totally severed from any kind of emotional and logistical transnational networks tends to proliferate, while the actual transnational connections and family relations of those young people are mostly overlooked in otherwise fascinating studies.

Moving away from a solely ‘Western-oriented’ perspective, for instance, in a study by Kõu et al. (2017) on the Indian migrant context to the Netherlands and the UK, the presence of parents and extended family in the constellation of migration trajectories highlights that life course events of linked lives shaped by key elements of care-giving and care-receiving becomes a setting for negotiating social norms and expectations. This particular study explored how family members facilitate through social norms migration and how such norm negotiations involve expectations for the provision of care-giving. In other contexts, such as different Southeast Asian households, the emergence of transnationally stretched families and global householding practices at different parameters of the care chain could give rise to different kinds of gender politics influencing the social provisioning of everyday and generational care (Yeoh, 2016).

This brings us to some of the useful conceptual tools or heuristic explanatory frameworks that help us explain experiential transnationality in migrant familyhood. For example, Goulbourne et al. (2010) have emphasised the usefulness of different spheres within which transnational family lives unfold, be that in socio-economic or politico-cultural parameters which might overlap or even intersect. They contend that such an approach contributes another critical lens in disrupting and de-centring the ‘normative’ status of the ‘the family’ (ibid).

Another conceptual approach that has been advanced by Anthias (2008, 2009, 2012) as providing a more integrated analysis in terms of locations and identities in moving away from specific ‘groups’ or ‘categories’ (gender/ethnicity/class) is that of an ‘intersectional translocational positionality’ (for an elaboration refer to Chap. 2). This approach argues for a more intersectional framing that pays particular attention to social locations and processes than social divisions. While the approach appears compelling, it might also signal an indirect tension between understanding the particularities of specific figurations shaped by social categories when one of the intersectional formations appears more pronounced in specific social circumstances (be that age, gender, class, ethnicity, race, generation, ability) driving those experiences in time and space.

A third conceptual approach to understanding transnational childhood and parenting is that of incorporating an affective lens. Despite the invisibility of migrant children as active members with agency in transnational families, a focus on ‘emotional labour’ can address them as actively engaging with transnational socialisation processes (King et al., 2011; Zeitlyn, 2012). Indeed, Mand (2015) suggests that the focus on the emotional labour of children as social actors can illuminate the nature of their agency, their emplacement and power relations performed as part of the transnational familial habitus. The lens of emotions also highlights that within transnational mobility an ‘affective habitus’ (Christou & Janta, 2019) underlines the significance of emotional encounters with transnational kin networks in refining social practices. It is intriguing to keep in mind that the emotional labour performed by migrant children, embodied and active, is a clearly agential effort by children to capture and acquire the appropriate socio-cultural capital to legitimise their belonging (King et al., 2011; Zeitlyn, 2012). While there is ambivalence in emotions and transnational lives, acts of agency by children are often overlooked as their experiences are not always analysed as socialising processes enmeshed with mobility. Hence, emotional experiences and embodied performances of transnational childhood should be viewed as constellations of socialising activity in mobility.

The agency of children’s practices in transnational familyhood transforms but also reproduces transnational social fields and as a result children actively develop and negotiate relationships with family members across transnational spaces (Gardner, 2012). Children exhibit active agency into transnational migration decisions (Ní Laoire et al., 2010; Cebotari et al., 2017) but it is relevant to examine changes to this as regards cultural factors, age, personal development. One core aspect of this discussion is to unpack the relationship between parental migration and child well-being but also the various dimensions in transnational parenting, some of which are discussed in the box below drawing on key empirical global evidence.

Box: Transnational Parenting: Some Indicative Research Results

Insights on reframing transnational mothering when it is seen as being ‘troubling’ when induced by the act of migration since children are left behind has been explored by Irena Juozeliūnienė and Budginaitė (2018) who combine interviews with transnational mothers over a period of a decade, but, also includes analyses from 79 articles on transnational families published over a 9 year period, along with national press and media sources in Lithuania. The analysis of the transnational migrant mother portrayals reveals that mothering is scripted and as an indication of agency, migrant mothers ‘normalise’ troubling narratives of their mothering and discredit those, thus bringing new meanings to migrant mothering performativities. These new storied accounts of mothering demonstrate agency in shifting previous ones and crafting alternative mothering performances. Hence, migrant mothering while being contested is also constructed and reinvented.

Research by Kufakurinani et al. (2014) regarding ‘transnational parenting and the emergence of “diaspora orphans” in Zimbabwe’ draws from interviews with adults providing childcare for left behind youth and children in Zimbabwe, including single parents, grandparents, siblings and care professionals. The research adds innovative debate strands from an intersectional aspect in focusing on the middle class, gender and the life stages. It also fosters more refreshing debates on diverging the analysis from poverty entrapment and subsequent labour migration during the crisis period in Zimbabwe, to issues of morality and emotionality on changing parenting practices and social discourses. One of those is on the emergence of ‘diaspora orphans’ as a negative stereotyping of moral parameters and a crisis of wealth when middle class families migrate but leave the children behind. It addresses aspects of transnational parenting from the angle of the carers and issues of intimacy in relationships and childcare.

Another politically charged aspect of transnational parenting has to do with changing gender ideologies when these are a result of migrant mothers engaged in labour migration (see Chap. 3) and have to redistribute caring responsibilities and carework required for children. The research by Lam and Yeoh (2018) draws on both quantitative and qualitative interviews with returning migrants and left-behind kin from communities in the Philippines and Indonesia. There are a number of emerging implications for left-behind fathers when mothers are absent.

Similarly to ‘doing gender’, ‘doing care labour’ not only reflects existing social hierarchies, it also reproduces or even exacerbates them. The evolving of new father-driven caring in the absence of migrant mothers in the Southeast context of Lam and Yeoh’s (2018) research creates ‘new package deals’ of reconstructing masculinities. These point to harnessing elements of responsibility, capability, adaptability and control in retaining on the one hand a sense of power and pride but also adjusting to the circumstances for successful provision of care (ibid: 113–114). Masculinities of fathering practices are thus strongly anchored on enduring obstacles while safeguarding self-image. These conclusions mirror to a great extent those findings of Pasura and Christou (2018) who have moved away from conceptualisations of black transnational forms of masculinities in perpetual crisis and have explored diverse notions of such as being challenged, reaffirmed and reconfigured. Moreover, beyond major global structural changes, both these research studies point to the sociologies of family relations as a livelihood shifting arrangement that combines the messiness of intimacy, affectivity, bonds, normative framings and pragmatic decision-making. In a sense gender identities and family roles appear to be blurred or undone when fathers become both mothers and fathers and mothers increasingly breadwinners in the household division of labour.

To an extent, these reconstructed and negotiated figurations of gendered scripts point to the mouldable capacity of roles as shaped by economics and not just socio-cultural framings. That is, as Lam and Yeoh (2018: 114) suggest: ‘In the era of migration and family survival, “doing family” may thus become more important than “doing gender”’. While the scale, intensity and practices in transnational parenting will differ across generations and geographies shaped by social locations, by and large, they illustrate that gender is an important parameter in the process. There are instances where its meaning is re-discovered in being re-invented and reconstituted, but above all, it is a defining dynamic for families, relations and identities.

Interesting findings emerge from a study by Gassmann et al. (2018) using household survey data from Moldova and Georgia to measure and compare multi-dimensional aspects of child well-being while ‘left behind’. Gassmann et al. (ibid) in their study are challenging normative accounts which claim that parental migration can have negative, harmful or destructive impacts on children’s well-being outcomes, and, instead focus on dimensions of wellness as regards education, health, housing, safety, communication and emotional well-being. Their study operationalises well-being in a holistic and multidimensional framework that refutes opposing narratives of transnational parenting as dysfunctional.

Gender ideologies also intersect with layers of dynamism in how caring unfolds given the transnational habitus that children experience. In the instance of the global South, Kofman and Raghuram (2012) alert us to a dynamism and diversity of caring arrangements and point to the importance of empirical studies taking on board a wider interplay of the household that incorporates elements of communities, the state, financial markets and intra-family relationships. In the case of the research with Zimbabwean children, it appears that money for instance, undermined the impact of ‘authority in families’ (Kufakurinani et al., 2014: 127) and actually shaped the quality of caregiving which was dependent on remittances received when there were no complaints of their service provided. As an extension of this however, children appear to have a degree of agency in not accepting or resisting the authority of caregivers since the latter for fear of losing their source of income would not contest the children’s behaviour. Wider external and outsider opinion would highly criticise the above strategic lax child control on the basis of personal interest rather than appropriate child developmental practices. Bluntly put, the employed caregivers seemed to ‘care’ more about the money they received rather than properly caring for the left behind children.

As Christou and Michail (2015: 72) observe in their research on migrant mothers, there is a ‘continuous complexity that the dichotomy of private and public invokes’ as they seek to understand how those spaces intertwine and intersect with mothering practices. Their research with women in their 40s and 50s from Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and Poland who have migrated to Greece and within a transnational habitus are raising children there is premised on viewing migrant mothers as co-producers of ‘inclusive socialization of the second generation as agents of intercultural citizenship’ (ibid).

Indeed, as Kufakurinani et al. (ibid: 135) suggest, research on transnational families with a ‘focus on the nodes of the “care triangle” that are often overlooked in studies of transnational parenting can be particularly revealing – i.e. the views of the foster parental caregivers and those in positions of authority over such children within schools and communities, as well as the children themselves’. Hence, it is integral to also view children as agents of change, often involved in the migrant transnational caring context and not simply as passive recipients of migration, parenting decisions and practices.

Cross-border family arrangements linked to the increase of ‘mother-away’ families can also lead to questions of ‘moral accountability’ of migrant mothers regarding the actual well-being of their children (Juozeliūnienė & Budginaitė, 2018) as linked with the significant increase of international migration patterns of Lithuanians following the country’s 2004 accession to the EU. Juozeliūnienė and Budginaitė provide some core insights to these issues based on interviews with transnational mothers over a decade (2004–2014) combined with media depictions of transnational families. Such long-distance mothering practices and cross-border family arrangements are considered as problematic in being designated as ‘troubles’ for the children who remain in Lithuania while their mothers migrate to work overseas. There are gendered ways here through which applications of ‘moral standing’ as regards childcare are enacted in classifying mothering practices through narratives of parental ethical stances. These are situated within discussions of how transnational parenting can become politicised and policed scripts.

At the same time, there is research (Haagsman, 2018) that suggests links between transnational family life and negative outcomes for job prospects when comparing Angolan parents with ‘left behind’ children and those who live in the Netherlands with all their children. The findings, cross-cutting migration studies and organisational psychology through mediation analysis, indicate that transnational family life has a direct impact in increasing migrant parents changing jobs due to low levels of happiness. This is an integral aspect of a more holistic study of transnational family relations in redirecting attention of how transnational family life circumstances affect the employment potential outcomes for parents, especially as labour prospects and financial returns are seen as a core objective to the choice of living transnational lives. So, where transnational migration and family studies have been preoccupied with the affective impact for children, similar investigations regarding parental transnational working lives have been scarce. In the next section, we’ll explore additional affective realms of transnational lives, namely those surrounding intimacies and sexualities.

4.4 Transnational Intimacies and Sexualities

The expansion toward more diverse forms of intimacy in familial relations as well as issues of sexuality are imperative for both research and policy in returning to the moral sense of facilitating less economic driven regulation and more socially just reunification, at present, when it comes to family migration (Kofman, 2019).

Transnational intimacies and sexualities are important as gendered practices and inextricably linked to global mobilities. However, the study of transnational intimacy, sexual relations and sexual migrant identities, has, for a long time, been confined to heteronormative parameters defining relationships and families under such a unidirectional gaze. Although a decade or so ago Mai and King (2009) argued for a combined ‘sexual’ and ‘emotional’ turn in mobility studies in underscoring the intersectionalities of these two dimensions and their grounding in more productive queer theory driven research (see Chap. 2), there has been slow progress in global investigations informed by those intersections. Queer mobilities account for the emotional and embodied dimensions as shaped by desires and intimate attachments (Gorman-Murray, 2009) and the possibilities of transnational feminist queer research can contest configurations of power and hierarchies of the Global North/Global South (Browne et al., 2017). Engagements with the multiplicity of the politics of place, as well as across geographical locations, highlight not only spatial nuances but also brings researchers into dialogue with diverse flows and boundaries.

Yet, as highlighted in the queer migration literature, homemaking in diverse home spaces tends to be negotiated in spaces of liminality, dislocation and opposition especially to homonationalism and heteronormativity (Luibhéid, 2008; Mole, 2016; Wimark, 2019). At the same time, some of those tensions have been used as a springboard for research focusing on the potential benefit of ‘queer diaspora’ as a heuristic device to think about identity, belonging and solidarity among sexual minorities in the context of dispersal and transnational networks (Mole, 2018). Moreover, there is a continued call to apply gender analysis when studying post-migration experiences of lesbians and gay male immigrants (Fournier et al., 2018).

As a research instrument, a transnational sexualities approach is committed to being theoretically, epistemologically and ethically self-reflexive to the co-production of knowledge and the de-centring of established categories. It is an inclusive approach in embracing largely marginal populations in the process of knowledge production, in intersectional terms, (for instance, working-class queer disabled religious ethnic minority sexualities) queering and questioning social categories, politics, practices and ideologies that reproduce exclusion. Hence, transnational sexualities approaches provide a critical lens to explore connections and circulations of sexual subjectivities, sexual discourses and mobile practices across two or more national contexts. Within the conceptual parameters of transnationality, sexualities and intimacies are understood as sexual formations imbued with mobility meanings in a terrain whereupon local, global and national hegemonies and politics intersect.

Research on transnational sexualities and intimacies maintains a sustained attention to both cultural and historical figurations within circuits of transnational mobility, relational dynamics in space, time and embodied performances. By extension, transnational sexualities and intimacy studies need to locate their analyses within contexts of cultural, political and historical connections while being informed by broader questions highlighting issues of globalisation, modernity, development, capital, nationalisms, colonialisms, imperialisms, racialisations, etc. as departure points to problematise discourses, otherwise reified, naturalised or normalised.

Contestable and ‘notoriously obscure, due to its conceptual complexity, historicity and political situatedness’ (Chattopadhyay, 2018: 149), the concept of borders is also compelling and pivotal to challenging Eurocentric representations of migrant intimacies in understanding everyday lives of migrant trajectories from the Global South to Europe. Such insights forge parallels of the biopolitics of borders with the geopolitical histories of colonialism and imperialism in Europe. Again, these (often critical and feminist informed) conceptualisations deepen understandings of migrant experiences, identities and intimacies. In various social spheres there is an increased emergence of experiences of everyday borderings which are differentiated according to situated circumstances and social positionings of migrants (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018).

Indeed, borders and bordering lives have become ‘a flourishing research agenda on everyday geographies and ontologies of personal (in)security’ (Vaughan-Williams & Pisani, 2018: 1). While the recent 2015 ‘Mediterranean Migration Crisis’ has brought to the fore and made visible a number of long-standing border regime crises (ibid), there is also a body of works that has examined the border as a social construction within historical, geopolitical and socio-cultural underpinnings always undergoing varying processes of transformation (Johnson et al., 2011) (see Chap. 5). It is argued that marriage migration ‘is integral to many transnational communities, that is, those that have established themselves in several countries across the world. In other cases, marriage migration may represent a first migration step which creates a potential for future links between countries’ (ibid, p.1).

Examining the intersections between marriage, sexuality, migration and citizenship contributes to understanding all concepts outside their singularity as a social phenomenon or social status (Chauvin et al., 2021) and underscores that these need to be located within the larger political economy and historical trajectories encountered in particular regions (Ibrahim, 2018). For instance, in ‘the context of South Asia, contemporary cross-border migration builds on networks of trade, labour, and marriage that have endured across partition, and is a potent reminder that new borders drawn up in 1947 or 1971 were not the definitive hiving-off of territory so much as the inauguration of new regimes of citizenship and border management on the part of the state, and of new expressions of identity and belonging for its citizens’ (ibid: 1665). It becomes clear that cross-border marriage mobility should be viewed within sociological and historical parameters, discursive conditions and negotiations of belonging and citizenship. Hence, transnational ‘marriage-scapes’ gender our understanding of contemporary transnational migration by highlighting the effects of border-crossings on familial and gender roles.

A redirection to the study of ‘intimate mobilities’ has occurred because ‘much migration research remains desexualized and overlooks emotional and intimate relationships’ (Groes & Fernandez, 2018: 1). Reconfigurations of gender relations are also complex in transnational marriage contexts and those can revert to traditional roles, be amplified or even reversed and undermined depending on the parameters of socio-cultural integration (Charsley, 2012; Charsley et al., 2016).

But integration and gender are also pertinent in the discussion of migrant care and ageing in transnational fields (Zontini, 2015). Findings by Zontini (ibid) from her long-term study of transnational ageing Italian migrants in the UK, reveal that community and belonging enhance successful ageing but above all, strength and reciprocity of bonds with co-ethnics locally and transnationally showed a sense of well-being linked to those experiences. Nevertheless, overall, findings of studies on transnational caring of ageing migrants demonstrates that there are many challenges involved, from negotiating the expectations and obligations of caring to issues of loneliness and trauma when those expectations and obligations are disrupted by migration of the children or even the complications of ‘crises’ phases in the care responsibilities of transnational families (King & Vullnetari, 2006; Baldassar, 2007, 2014).

Useful terminology to conceptualise the complexities, fluctuations and networkings regarding ageing care are, for instance, the one proposed by Baldassar and Merla as ‘circulation of care’ referring to the ‘reciprocal, asymmetrical and multi-directional exchange of care’ (2013: 25), as well as ‘family care regimes’ (Kilkey & Merla, 2014) to denote the micro-sociologies of family arrangements. Rather revealing of wider social organisation is the fact that counter to such positive accounts of transnational family care in the international literature, there are compelling research contributions that highlight the challenges and difficulties encountered as fundamentally linked to transnational care and that strong transnational family ties are not necessarily the only or an inevitable outcome of transnational migration (e.g. Schröder-Butterfill & Newman, 2019; Schröder-Butterfill & Fithry, 2014).

Transnational family relations and the circulations of care are social practices that incorporate performativities of intimacy and affectivity. Such relations involve a number of challenges and their dynamics reveal the interplay of migrant agency and wider institutional structures. In the box content we focus on a few core empirical case studies and link their central findings to the wider literature to draw some wider reflections on interdisciplinary research on migration and family studies. While there are numerous empirical examples to draw on from the proliferation of research over the last 25 years on transnationalism and more recently on transnational families (Glick Schiller et al., 1992; Faist, 2000; Levitt, 2001; Chee, 2005; Parreñas, 2005; Carling et al., 2012) there is still much to highlight in focusing on a few selective case studies and drawing some key insights with a lens to gender and migration. In selecting case studies to illuminate some core insights regarding transnational families, we are also guided by the call to set aside methodological nationalism in providing a more global perspective on how migration driven social theories can explain global, national and local phenomena in a mutually constitutive way (Glick Schiller, 2009). We thus see both families and transnational family processes as components of transnational dynamics whereupon nation-states are core in shaping their relations but are also arenas of power dynamics (Glick Schiller, 2005).

For one, the large volume of literature on transnational families has focused almost exclusively on migrant transnational mothering, and, less so on fathers and fathering (Kilkey et al., 2014) (see Chap. 3), and, even less so from a queer perspective which reaffirms normative universalisations of gendered scripted lives of domesticity in heteronormative framings (Manalansan, 2006; Kosnick, 2011). Recent studies on black, migrant and gay/lesbian families (Moore, 2011; Capps & Fix, 2012) are seminal in extending issues of relationality, connectedness and intimacy by challenging heteronormative paradigms and introducing intersectional diversities and complexities in family lives.

4.5 Conclusion

Though previously understudied, movement due to familial and intimate reasons has grown enormously, especially as a result of the interest in how families live separated across space and time, the changing gendered and generational structures of the family, and how economic and emotional resources circulate between family and kin members to ensure their social reproduction. More recently, comparative research, both qualitative and quantitative, has yielded a better understanding of differences between countries and regions. As we have also seen in this chapter, a number of new perspectives have been developed to include men and masculinities in familial movements, tasks such as transnational parenting and to question the heteronormativity of assumptions. Increasingly same sex couples have been included within immigration regulations for family migrations, especially in Europe and other major societies of immigration.