Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender In

Patricia R. Pessar and Sarah J. Mahler’s article is an important bridge between migration studies and feminist theory. It challenges accounts that treat migration as a gender-neutral economic flow, household strategy, or population movement. People in transnational migration do not move, remit, care, owe obligations, or gain status in the same ways.

The article’s gendered geographies of power framework is especially useful. It shows that power is not located only in either sending or receiving societies. It circulates across families, states, migration regimes, labor markets, ethnic networks, and transnational imaginaries. A person’s gender, class, racialized identity, legal status, and family position shape whether she can migrate, how she migrates, what responsibilities follow, and whether her agency is recognized.

For FemRes, this is a base text for the migration topic. It shows that transnational feminism cannot mean an abstract global sisterhood. It must analyze how borders, care, labor, legal status, remittances, and kinship jointly produce inequality.