Abstract
This chapter’s goal is to explore the LATT couples’ gender roles and practices in transnational settings. Differentiating between sex and gender, it explores the historical ‘gender order,’ zooming in on studies-based patterns about some LAT couples’ subversion of this order. It focuses on how LATT upset the traditional gender expectations about the so-called trailing partner, allowing most women more freedom, subverting gendered cohabitation norms (Upton John, 2015), and balancing autonomy and fusion. The overarching concept of transnational feminism, including differences, similarities, and connections across national borders (Mohanty, 2001), is drawn upon to investigate further gender dynamics. Moreover, the social support/ pressure to live together by the “significant others” is discussed. It also demonstrates that non-cohabitation is not a salient issue for the three same-sex LATT couples in the book’s empirical study. Lastly, the Chapter highlights the relatively rare phenomenon of parenting among LATT couples with young children, which is just 20% of the participants in the study.
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Notes
- 1.
I am highly critical of the term ‘homeland’ in relation to transnationalism, as the subjective belonging and attachment to ‘home’ may change with time I prefer the term ‘country of origin’ when referring to the sending country’ vis-a-vis host/receiving country.
- 2.
Grover and Schliewe (2020), define a trailing spouse as a woman accompanying her husband on transnational postings and expatriate assignments, excluded from the paid labour force in the host country. However, I consider this definition narrow and would include men and women accompanying their partners.
- 3.
Ideally, if Late Living Apart Together becomes more institutionalised, it will potentially be a force for social change, including more egalitarian gender relations. These ideas resonate with research among partnered adults aged 50 and older in the Netherlands, which shows that women, older participants, and parents were more likely to LAT than to remarry or cohabit, while women were also motivated to LAT to protect their financial assets (de Jong Gierveld & Merz, 2013). The Canadian qualitative study of LAT couples discussed in Chap. 3 (Kobayashi et al., 2017) also found that women saw LAT as a way for older couples to avoid gendered household tasks and partner nurturing and to protect autonomous decision-making about finances and the home.
- 4.
A slang term for the idea that a particular romantic couple (or potential romantic couple) is meant to be together (and, in the context of a fictional work, that one thinks should be in a relationship when the work ends).
- 5.
A survey by OECD conducted in 2019 notes that there is only partial acceptance of homosexuality in Mexican society. Attitudes towards LGBT people are improving worldwide and have consistently been more positive in OECD countries than elsewhere; however, there remains substantial room for progress. Mexico is no exception, and Mexican citizens are judged to be only halfway to full social acceptance of homosexuality, scoring nearly five on a 1-to-10 acceptance scale, in line with the average OECD score (Mexico, 2021).
- 6.
Fertility in the UK in the last decade was around 1.7, while in Northern Europe in 2010 around 1.8. While in India, the fertility rate has declined from 3 in 2000 to two and a half now (Holmes, 2014, p. 108, 9). This decline is explained by the changes in family practices, including intimacy at distance, emerging from an economic and ideological shift from a rural agricultural economy to an urban industrial economy.
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Singla, R. (2024). Gendered Practices: Gender Order, Significant Others, and Parenting. In: Living Apart Together Transnationally (LATT) Couples. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52205-5_6
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