White Migrations

Gender, Whiteness and Privilege in Transnational Migration

C. Lundström

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137289186
• eBook ISBN: 9781137289193
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

From a multi-sited ethnography with Swedish migrant women in the United States, Singapore and Spain, the book explores gender vulnerabilities and racial and class privilege in contemporary feminized migration, filling a gap in literature on race and migration.

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White Migrations: A Theoretical Outline

The concept of white migration could be regarded as an oxymoron in that a migrant is rarely thought of as white, and white people tend not to be seen as ‘migrants’. Rather, white subjects ‘out of place’ are more probably conflated with the position of a tourist, an expatriate, a mobile professional or just passing as a European or North American. Rakel is one of these white subjects abroad who is unable to identify herself as a migrant. Four years ago she gave up her job and moved from Sweden to southern Spain, and is currently living with her husband on the Costa del Sol. In Rakel’s view there is a discursive gap between privileged subjects experiencing a lack of discrimination and (im)migrants, who are defined by discrimination. Whereas the latter ‘is’ a migrant, the former, according to Rakel, has yet to be defined.

The non-privileged migrant is also the one who has often been subjectified as ‘the migrant’ in (Western) literature, research or the media (and as such ‘the problem’ in ‘our’ current times). Here ‘the migrant’ tends to be imagined as the embodiment of suffering caused by economic and political exposure.¹ As the sociologist Floya Anthias (2012, p. 102) observes:

[w]hen migration is the object of study this presupposes questions being framed around a notion of ‘a migrant’ – a category formulated as an abstract category (implicitly presupposing an undifferentiated human subject) relating to the prototype of the economic migrant.

The notion of ‘the migrant’ is also a result of the recurrent focus on in-migration rather than out-migration in Europe and the US (Knowles and Harper, 2009),² although today’s image of the economic migrant could target both low-skilled and high-skilled workers fleeing the current economic crisis, particularly in Europe.

As a result, whiteness, and to some extent race, are rarely explicit analytical concepts in Migration Studies, but rather implicit or assumed.³ The discursive concept of ‘the migrant’ tends to be used as a marker of non-whiteness and a non-Westerner, who, in contrast to Rakel and other white migrants, is certainly confronted by negative racial stereotypes, racism, discrimination, marginalization and exploitation.⁴ In this conceptual conflation, non-white bodies ‘out of place’ tend to be (mis)read as being (first, second or even third generation) migrants, ‘illegal immigrants’ or ‘asylum seekers’, despite their possible citizenship in the country in which they reside (Ahmed, 2000; Lundström, 2007). On the contrary, ‘white migrants’ can inhabit the world as part of a global enterprise, tourists, expatriates, guests, development aid workers, and so on, representing humanity, whose presence remains undisputed or who are able to use their white ethnicity as a form of ‘symbolic ethnicity’ (Waters, 1990). The question of migration is therefore intimately connected to the politics of mobility, its restrictions and possibilities. Sara Ahmed (2007, p. 162) formulates it eloquently:

The discourse of ‘stranger danger’ reminds us that danger is often posited as originating from what is outside the community, or as coming from outsiders, those people who are not ‘at home’, and who themselves have come from ‘somewhere elsewhere’ (where the ‘where’ of this ‘elsewhere’ always makes a difference). The politics of mobility, of who gets to move with ease across the lines that divide spaces, can be re-described as the politics of who gets to be at home, who gets to inhabit spaces, as spaces that are inhabitable for some bodies and not others, insofar as they extend the surfaces of some bodies and not others.

This book examines how extensions of whiteness are played out in Swedish transnational migration. This is done by linking the interdisciplinary fields of migration studies and critical whiteness studies. The book is the result of a transnational comparative ethnographic work conducted between 2006 and 2010, with Swedish-speaking, first-generation migrant women residing in the southwestern parts of the US, Singapore and southern Spain. It explores how the women (re-)install themselves in these different social and racial geopolitical contexts, and pays particular attention to the intersections of race, whiteness, class, gender, sexuality and nation in these processes. Installing oneself points to the instalment of bodies in new asymmetric power relations and structures through migration (cf. Ahmed, 2000). In this context I ask: How do Swedish migrant women adjust to, uphold or re-create new ethnic and racial identities within a contemporary migration frame and how are the boundaries of whiteness reconstructed through transnational migration? Even though the empirical focus is on white Swedish-speaking migrant women, the analytical emphasis is not directed at the physical body as a carrier of ontological meanings. The orientation is rather how white femininities are reinstalled in different national contexts as they find their ways in new racial formations, where boundaries of whiteness and femininity have to be renegotiated through migration.

Migrations are ‘about people in transit, both as immigrants and as emigrants’, as Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik (2009, p. 2) put it. People ‘migrate from some place to another, rendering every migrant an emigrant from one country or locality and an immigrant in another.’ Migration as a concept is closely linked to the incentive to increase one’s opportunities in life, albeit with different resources and capital. But whether bodies are able to migrate or are halted on the way is a question related to the resources – embodied or institutional – that migrants carry with them. What kind of queries can then be formulated if we think about transnational migration in terms of whiteness? How is whiteness shaped by migration processes, and how are migration processes shaped by whiteness? What can be learned by not reserving the concept of migration for underprivileged migrants moving from South to North or East to West? These inquiries highlight the social and conceptual relationship of white affluent migrants who migrate between their ‘home’ and ‘host’ countries as a pivotal aspect of transnational migration. Some of these migrants move for love or in search of a different way of life, while some work or study for a limited period of time and end up not returning ‘home’. Others decide to spend their retirement in a different country, while some migrants have homes in more than one country. Certainly, a large number of these groups could be labelled – and even refer to themselves – as ‘expatriate migrants’ or ‘lifestyle migrants’ (Knowles and Harper, 2009; Leonard, 2010).⁵

Swedish women who have either migrated on a permanent or temporary basis to the US, Singapore or Spain mirror a complex set of intersections that have affected their positions as migrants in relation to the global privileges reserved for white Northern Europeans (or even Scandinavians) abroad. For many of the women who migrated from the 1950s and onwards, and in contrast to most stories about migration, their migration experiences have often been coupled with upward class mobility and increased privileges. They have also had gendered outcomes, in that they often lost their position in the labour market and became economically dependent on their wealthier spouses. Like Lise-Lotte, who has lived on the south-west coast of the US for over 20 years, many women married wealthy American men, thereby opting out of a possible working career and becoming housewives or stay-at-home mothers. In the case of Singapore, the women’s positions as ‘trailing spouses’ often involved a shift from a dual-career family situation in Sweden to a housewife/expatriate wife position, often with a foreign migrant woman doing the daily household chores (cf. Leonard, 2008; Yeoh and Huang, 2010). Just like Jenny, who migrated to Singapore as an expatriate wife to accompany her Swedish husband nine years ago, many of the women here were well-educated but chose a different trajectory for a couple or so years. As part of a diverse group of lifestyle migrants, Rakel moved as a trailing spouse to Spain in search of a different lifestyle.

Racializing migration processes

Making use of a transnational perspective on white migration, the book aims to explore two underdeveloped areas. The first is the meaning of race and whiteness in transnational migration processes today. The second is the diverse expressions of whiteness and their complex intersections with other axes of inequality in the contemporary dynamics of global power relations. My ambition is not to argue for a general understanding of whiteness as a single global entity, but to explore Swedish whiteness in particular times and places. In order to understand migration as a contextualized transnational process, migration is, here, seen as: a) an individual process of mobility and transition, b) a contextual phenomenon where migrants are positioned vis-à-vis a diverse local population as well as other minorities and migrant groups, and c) a global process that is shaped by and shapes national and transnational relations.

With the number of migrants living outside their country of birth or citizenship now topping the 200 million mark, and constituting around three per cent of the world’s population, it becomes clear that the category mirrors a diverse group of people whose migrations are interrelated (Knowles and Harper, 2009).⁶ For instance, when lifestyle migrants seek to expand their ‘quality of life’ abroad, they are ‘in need’ of an increasingly vulnerable migrating labour force ready to take the jobs offered to them in the current division of global labour.⁷ As Saskia Sassen (2008, p. 457) argues, this means that the ‘international division of labor has included a variety of translocal circuits for the mobility of labor and capital’. This is especially the case in the domestic sphere.

Whilst analyses of migrants’ exposure are needed to capture the many ways in which migrants are (ab)used as cheap labour, indentured workers or sexually exploited women in a globalized market – to mention only a few palpable examples of the relation between migration and global economic forces – these stories reflect specific facets of the complex phenomenon of migration. Meanwhile, for other individuals contemporary transnational migration is accompanied by a ‘taken-for-granted-ness’ of the right to mobility and access to ‘foreign’ places, which involves increased privileges and upward class mobility.⁸ The apparently contrasting images of the lifestyles of ‘expatriate migrants’ and ‘migrant workers’ may thus reinforce each other, in much the same way as oppression and privilege are intimately intertwined in any social process (Pease, 2010). The sociologist Anja Weiss (2005) argues that we need to look at the ‘quality of space’ that different groups have access to in the current transnationalization of social inequality in order to understand how migrants’ opportunities differ and how privileged migrants view themselves through the frame of migration. Weiss (2005, p. 723) suggests that:

A migratory life-course may be characterized by social autonomy. And it can structurally be defined as a portfolio of resources that are globally acknowledged and asked for. A specific subgroup of highly skilled migrants combines both features to some extent. As their cultural capital is transnationally accepted and asked for, barriers to migration are reduced, which permits them to move with few restrictions in globalized labour markets. The majority of migrants are in a less desirable position. Migration results in a depreciation of their location-specific capital.

Although the different aspects of cultural capital among lifestyle migrants have been discussed by various researchers, race and whiteness (and sometimes gender) are rarely explicit in these studies.⁹ This silence also veils questions such as the embodiment of race and whiteness, and the importance of the direction and context of migration. Research on white migration, which refers broadly to migration from or within the Western world, indicates that gender, race, sexuality and class restructure white migrants’ positions in the new society (Leonard, 2008; 2010; 2013). It is argued here that moving and re-installing whiteness in different national racial systems may well improve one’s opportunities in life, but may also result in the sense of being deprived of a normative and structurally invisible position.

In a discussion about the racialized aspects of the terms ‘lifestyle migrants’, ‘privileged migrants’ and ‘mobile professionals’, Pauline Leonard (2010, p. 2) suggests that these concepts simultaneously relate to ‘Others’, that is ‘other migrants’ who are differentiated by race, class, nationality, occupation and profession, being excluded from these conceptual boundaries. Rather than creating a conceptual difference between migration and mobility, we should perhaps reflect on the terms under which people move. Considering the theoretical framework of migration studies, Stephen Castles (2010, p. 1567) argues that:

[m]ovements of the highly skilled were celebrated as professional mobility, while those of the lower-skilled were condemned as unwanted migration. Mobility equalled good, because it was the badge of a modern open society; migration equalled bad because it re-awakened archaic memories of invasion and displacement. But it seems to me that a focus on migration, rather than mobility, better reflects real power relations.

Although it would be deeply unsatisfactory to trivialize the huge differences and exposure that processes of transnational migration entail, I argue that it is possible, and even fruitful, to analyse privileged groups as migrants without the presumption of migration ‘as a problem’ that takes for granted that poverty, discrimination or exploitation is directly linked to a history of migration per se – that is, coming from ‘elsewhere’ – yet is inscribed into the ‘migrant body’ and/or history. Rather, the suggestion is that processes of migration are shaped by historical and contemporary global racial hierarchies and ‘racial formations’ within the ‘host country’ (Omi and Winant, 1994; Roth, 2012; cf. Knowles and Harper, 2009). Thus, as Castles (2010, pp. 1582–3) suggests, there is a need to link the ‘analysis of migratory processes to broader social theory and through this to the analysis of societal change in general’.

An era of feminized migration

Transnational migration has been identified as a deeply gendered phenomenon that organizes and (trans)forms the lives of women and men in different ways (George, 2005; Mahler and Pessar, 2010). A number of authors have noted the increasing feminization of migration flows (Cuban, 2010; Ho, 2006; Piper, 2008). In literature on migrating women, migration is often tied to the increasing demand for domestic workers in affluent countries (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007; Parreñas, 2000), or is a result of women supporting men in their choice of career and thereby dedicating themselves to household duties (Ho, 2006). Overall, migrating women and men inhabit different social spaces and networks, and their social locations are reconstructed in different national and regional contexts in relation to the labour market, the household and the community (Anthias and Lazaridis, 2000; Bao, 1998; Joseph and Lundström, 2013).

Women in foreign settings are certainly not new to history. European women had a central role in the colonies and settler societies, taking part in varying gender relations according to contextual racial and class arrangements, albeit marked by ‘difference’ and ‘inequality’ (Janiewski, 1995; Stoler, 1997). The large number of European women in the colonies was further ‘accompanied by new distinctions based on race’ (Stoler, 2002, p. 55). Sexuality and reproduction were at the core of these new boundaries.

As many postcolonial theorists have pointed out, postcolonial does not signal the end of former colonial structures, but the continuity of colonial versions of gender, heterosexism, culture, difference and race in the contemporary structures of capitalism and discourses of multiculturalism (Lentin and Titley, 2011; Lugones, 2007; Mohanty, 2003). This calls for a reading of current global processes – including migration – in the light of former power structures, such as colonial relations (Knowles and Harper, 2009). Against the backdrop of linkages to gender, power, colonialism and the imperialism of the past, Anne-Meike Fechter points to the importance of asking ‘how more contemporary intersections of gender, power and globalization – and specifically global capitalism – are conceptualised’, and further argues that as the ‘new international division of labour’ shows, ‘the success of global capitalism was fundamentally based on sexism’ (Fechter, 2010, p. 1281). Looking at postcolonial migration, Fechter points out that contemporary ‘discussions of gender and global capitalism are shaped by a focus on poor women, producing particular and limited perspectives’ (2010, p. 1294). Accordingly, in their ‘structured invisibility’ white and/or European migrant women have been virtually erased in contemporary analyses of migration, because they constitute a relatively small segment of the migrant community (see Frankenb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Acknowledgements
• 1 White Migrations: A Theoretical Outline
• 2 A Multi-Sited Ethnography of Whiteness
• 3 Doing Similarity in a White-Women’s Network
• 4 Hierarchies of Whiteness in the United States
• 5 Racial Divisions in Expatriate Lives in Singapore
• 6 Disintegrating Whiteness in Southern Spain
• 7 Gender and Whiteness in Motion
• 8 Migration Studies Revisited
• Notes
• References
• Index