184 - Special Session. Gender, Migration and Nation-Building

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Abstract

The relationship between sending states and their emigrants is being redefined. Contemporary emigrants leave countries at more advanced stages of nation-building and with a strong sense of both national identity and obligation to their home country than in previous eras of migration. Sending states ask emigrants, increasingly constructed a “heroes of the nation,” to take responsibility for the economic development of their homelands. Yet the simultaneous feminization of migration poses particular challenges to sending states and nation-building projects because women are constructed as cultural bearers of the nation, women’s sexuality represents national morality and “ethnic purity,” and how a nation treats its women is used by the international community as an indicator of modernity. The papers in this panel explore this evolving relationship between the nation-building projects of both sending and receiving states and the gendered dynamics of migration and development.

Sub Unit

• Special Sessions

Session Organizer

• Cinzia Solari, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Presider

• Cinzia Solari, University of Massachusetts-Boston

Individual Presentations

• Regulating Migrant Motherhood in a Time of Fertility Crisis and Intensive Parenthood: The Case of Taiwan - Pei-Chia Lan, National Taiwan University

• Country of Freedom, Country of the Damned: Gender and the Cross-Border Politics of Migrant Mexico - Abigail Andrews, University of California-San Diego

• Migration, Womenomics, and Nationalism: The Challenges for Japan and the Implications for Asia - Nana Oishi, University of Melbourne

• Fixing Femininity: Culture and Privilege in Transnational IT - Smitha Radhakrishnan, Wellesley College