‘Are we falling apart?’: manufacturing familyhood through transnationalism

ABSTRACT

This article initiates methodological discussions to understand how transnationalism manufactures cultural discourse of family practices and repairs intimacy within family-kin relationships from a distance. Prior studies in family ties overstate the shifts in family practices by highlighting the dichotomy of ‘modern’ and ‘tradition’ intimacy. However, family practices and intimacy are more compelling, and require empirical examination of how migrants interact and restore meaningful relationships in different cultural landscapes with their family-kin. Contributing to this literature, this article explores the repairing process of transnationalism in building meaningful familiar relationships from a distance, and the reconfiguration of the meanings and practices of familyhood in the migration process. Drawing on insight from interview data gathered from transnational Turkish migrants in the UK, this article argues that migration does not merely transform the family-kin practices, the understanding of intimacy and personal life of migrants; it brings emotional and ontological security. This paper raises questions on the role of migration in repairing intimacy and family practices, rather than shift and disjuncture the familiar connections. Therefore, it negotiates how migration provides space and courage to migrants to repair their intimacy and relationships with family-kin and reconfigure the meaning of familyhood while they enact their lives transnationally.

KEYWORDS:

• Family practices
• intimacy
• transnationalism
• Turkish migrants in the UK

Introduction

How does transnational migration influence the intimacy in family-kin from countries of origin and the understanding of family-kin practices? A growing literature extensively demonstrates the transformative impact of migration on family life. Particularly the matter of ‘sense of collectively’ and ‘kinship of migrant families’ (Gotehus, 2022; Ryan et al., 2009), the intersection between family network and social capital (Goulbourne et al., 2010; Guveli et al., 2016), parenting, marriage and partner choice, attachments of second-generation with cultural roots (Cook & Waite, 2016; Fouron & Schiller, 2001; Levitt & Waters, 2002), shifted emotional process between family members (Boccagni, 2010; Orellana et al., 2001), gender and gender inequality (Guveli et al., 2016; Żadkowska et al., 2022) are the common debates that discuss the family and family attachments in the transnational field. While such works reveal how transnational migration brings about changes and negotiations in family life, they encourage recent research to investigate further ways these families sustain their interpersonal relationships in the transnational process. Some scholars acknowledge long-distance interaction among family members as fuelling and reflecting the process of everyday life (Al-Qahtani et al., 2022; Barglowski, 2021). They suggest this process should be recognized as the practice of ‘distance filling’ as a result of affections and moral obligations between family members or relatives rather than shifting boundaries in family practices (Boccagni, 2012, p. 262). Their discussions offer new strategies to understand how migrants sustain and develop transnational family ties and how they negotiate the cultural expectations on family and roles in the family in the migration process (Al-Qahtani et al., 2022; Mahler & Pessar, 2001 Orellana et al., 2001;). Transnational migration complicates family life, and challenges the cultural expectations and values of family-kin relationships and practices. As Spencer and Pahl (2006) and Goulbourne et al. (2010) highlight, individuals become more familiar with significant changes in practising love, romance, closeness, intimacy and friendship through migration, and intimate practices enacted transnationally provide different analytical layers in relation to migration, intimate life, relationships and boundary-crossing in contemporary life.

To contribute to this growing literature, this article explores how transnational migration provides an opportunity to repair intimacy in family and build meaningful relationships with family-kin from a distance. It argues that focusing on the developments and challenges of migrants’ family-kin practices here and there would change the meaning of familyhood for migrants. In a specific context, the article examines how migratory experiences of transnational Turkish migrants reconfigure the family-kin practices over time and place. It argues how transnational life changes intimacy and emotional bonding of 25 transnational Turkish migrants with their family-kin and non-kin. In doing so, this article explores the conflicts in cultural values of family-kin practices and gender expectations and roles in the family. It discusses how these reconstruct family practices based on the values of host societies. Through this article, I address the three core arguments to reveal how transnational Turkish migrants manufacture family-kin practices through the migration process. First, I reveal how migration can be utilized as a useful tool to repair broken attachments with family and restore meaningful relationships with family-kin from a distance. Second, I discuss how migrants can negotiate cultural aspects of family-kin relationships and gender roles through the values of receiving societies. Last, I argue how transnational migrants generate family-kin relationships with others in the host society.

Transnational family-kin practices, intimacy gender expectations and Turkish migrants

When we talk about family in migration, recent migration studies engage with a wide range of elements to define the features and activities of family practices. Prior literature defines transnational family practices by focusing on how they sustain their interpersonal relationships beyond their cultural heritage. Their conceptual analysis discusses kinship practices, family networks, and intimate connections among family members located in multiple territories (Baldassar et al., 2007; Svašek, 2008; Wilding, 2006). While some scholars investigate the practices to sustain family ties across the border, they primarily focus on long-distance family attachments. Orellana et al. (2001) and Boccagni (2012) note that transnational family members, particularly migrant mothers, remain embedded in their family member's life through phone calls and messaging, although such shifted attachments can cause emotional tribulations, anxieties, and feelings of inadequacy. These studies acknowledge that transnational family practices offer new views and tools to negotiate the cultural expectations on family and roles in the family in the migration process. Alongside long-distance family attachments, another literature assumes marriage from migrant communities is an important element in transnational family attachments and emotional connections. The works of Ducu (2018) and Levitt and Waters (2002) show that some migrants tend to find a marriage partner from their country of origin to sustain family traditions and connections. In this sense, transnational family practices are blended, which involve the values, activities and embodied emotions from both sending and receiving societies.

Although transnational families have been extensively defined by highlighting the implications of transnationalism on the structure and form of family relations, studies focused on Turkish migrant families only partially engage with such wider debates on transnational family practices. Well-known examples, including Guveli et al. (2016), Bilecen (2013a) and Kagitcibasi (1996), analyse the construction of transnational families by focusing on family networks, social protections and the transition of family culture in the Turkish community. Bilecen claims ‘migration has greatly transformed the structure and distribution of the family's protective resources (care and financial and information help)’ (2013, p. 221). She suggests that such protective resources are continuously exchanged among family members and extend their direction across multiple borders. Transnational Turkish families create strategies to hold a connection with their family members transnationally. She states that ties among family members become visibly practised through their migration process. Hence, she acknowledges migration process re-embodies family structures by practising informal social protections. These studies provide significant discussion to understand the impact of the migration process on Turkish migrant families and their negotiations of family culture, and state these groups of families live mostly separately from each other, but create a feeling of collective welfare and unity ‘familyhood’ across borders. Although these emerging studies emphasize changes and continuities of family culture and develop strategies for the Turkish migrants’ family network, the issues of family practices, sustaining and developing intimacy and care among family members across time and place remain understudied. This article thus seeks to provide a framework to reveal such issues in transnational Turkish migrants’ family-kin practices in the migration process.

While transnational family practices modify the ways in which these group of families interact, it also reconstructs the gender roles and norms in some migrant families. The research discusses that although gender is culturally and ideologically constructed, its structure is not static (Creese, 2011; Guveli et al., 2016; Żadkowska et al., 2022). It can be deconstructed or reconstructed through its relations with ideologies and identity, which are not fixed like the transnational social field (Pessar & Mahler, 2003, p. 813). Gender simultaneously engages with ‘multiple spatial and social scales’ including the body, the family and the state (Mahler & Pessar, 2001, p. 445). Individuals who experience transnational social fields are expected to perform the normative gender expectations of both their transnational community and their new land. These studies highlight the intersection between geography, social location and gender, and reveal how gender ideologies and relations are reaffirmed and reconfigured by transnational actions.

In particular, recent studies on Turkish migrants investigate how migration affects gender relations, dynamics and expectations in Turkish migrants (Deilh et al., 2009; Guveli et al., 2016; Idema & Phalet, 2007; Liversage, 2012). Liversage (2012) claims Turkish migrant women may use local resources in a new country to shape their scope of gender and change their household culture into a more gender-equal environment. Similarly, Timmerman (2006) examines gender by questing its traditional understanding. Timmerman states the perspective of transnational gender roles, poor achievement at school and in the labour market harm the status of migrant men in the public and private spheres. From traditional gender roles, men are expected to be the main figures for the socio-economic well-being of their families. Timmerman claims such kinds of tasks for many Turkish migrant men are difficult. Many of them, she argues, ‘feel ignored or even threatened by western societies’ because of unsuccessful educational lives and working in non-well-paid jobs (p. 130). Hence, Timmerman suggests the transnational process can impact women and men differently. Alongside focusing on power dynamics among genders in Turkish migrant communities, Deilh et al. (2009) have turned their attention to answering why some Turkish migrants tend to hold more traditional gender roles and shape their household's culture through such structured gender roles. Their work on Turkish Muslim migrants indicates Islam greatly impacts cultural norms of gender relations. Turkish migrants who accommodate Islam into their lives have similar traditional gender roles and structures to those in Turkey. Their household culture remains traditional, despite their migration from Turkey. Deilh et al., therefore, assert that the Islamic heritage of culture can be considered an important factor in gender role orientations in transnational migrants’ contexts. Alongside gender roles and dynamics in Turkish migrant families, the concept of marriage, including cross-cultural (Huschek et al., 2012) and cross borders marriage (Baykara-Krumme, 2016; Ducu, 2018; Hooghiemstra, 2001), have been explored by studies on Turkish migrants. These scholars discuss how partner selections and marriage play a role in Turkish migrants’ integration process in their host countries. Their analyses reveal cultural understanding and traditional marriage practices in Turkish societies. However, they obscure the line between the ‘usefulness’ of marriages and ‘real’ marriages (Faier, 2008), and evaluate the meaning of marriage in terms of intimacy and instrumentality.

Although the dynamics of gender and family have been studied in the Turkish migrants’ context, there is still a significant gap in current research on transnational Turkish family-kin practices and intimacy. Previous studies argue that transnational Turkish families sustain their ties with their extended families in Turkey through providing goods, services, and social activities (Bilecen, 2013b; Böcker, 1993; Razum et al., 2005). Baldassar et al. (2016) argue intimate life is not performed in close proximity; on the contrary, they display diverse ways and forms across time and space. However, studies of Turkish migrants have yet to fully review or fully acknowledge the absence of the concept of emotions, intimacy, care and support in family and non-kin at a distance in transnational Turkish families. But the more important problem is that the concepts of intimacy that are applied translate poorly to Turkish migrant contexts. By drawing upon the insight from transnational family practices and Turkish migrants, this article shows it is essential to learn more about gender and family-kin practices within the migration process (Parrado & Flippen, 2005) because this shows the implications of transnationalism in migrants’ daily lives, and indicates how sets of life, such as sexuality, intimacy and education, are formulated by gender agency (Glenn, 1999) and traditional family structures. Particularly with this single article, I explore how transnational Turkish migrants rebuild and reimagine their family-kin practices and relationships in the migration process.

While the growing body of literature provides many contrary or overlapping definitions and usages for intimacy concerning sexuality, affections, emotions, care, support community and citizenship (Gabb, 2011), their examinations of intimacy and intimate practices are generally limited to Western cultures and societies. That complicates an understanding of intimacy in terms of a uniform definition. Specifically, there is a clear tension in the common usage of intimacy in which transnational Turkish migrants understand intimacy. Participants in this study understand and talk about intimacy in family-kin relationships associated with ‘closeness’, ‘familiarity’, ‘connection/communication’ and ‘sincerity’. Hence, this article defines intimacy and intimate practices surrounding these terms.

Research methodology: a qualitative approach to family-kin practices and intimacy of migrants

The data discussed in this article is based on research on intimate experiences and practices of transnational Turkish migrants living in the UK conducted in 2019 across the UK. The research adopts mixed qualitative methods to capture the transnational migrants lived experiences and de-traditionalised personal life from a distance and understand the complexity of migrants’ life (Chamberlayne et al., 2000). I conducted in-depth, face-to-face individual interviews and relational memo writing for each interview to provide opportunities for participants to share their experiences and expectations, and to develop analytical frameworks and provide in-depth understandings of hidden factors related to family practices and intimacy (Skeggs, 1997), and changes in family-kin and non-kin relationships, including restoring meaningful familiar relationships from a distance, challenging cultural and societal expectations, and building localized intimate connections with others.

The study was conducted on a sample of migrants who moved to the UK as first-generation skilled migrants. The participants were selected according to the purposive sampling technique based on their qualities, similar traits and cultural background (Scheyvens & Storey, 2003). I focus on how these precise similarities can be associated with my research aims. The selection criteria were migrating as first-generation from mainland Turkey and living transnationally between Turkish and British social spaces. I identified ‘first-generation transnational Turkish migrant’ as someone who has Turkish citizenship, self-identifies as Turkish, Turkish-Kurdish or Kurdish-Turkish and migrated to the UK from the mainland. This particular migrant group in the particular migrant community was likely to represent various issues, struggles, and concepts in recent Turkish migrants’ lives and migratory experiences. Likewise, ‘living transnationally’ is defined by the practices of Turkish migrants who settled in the UK, create a sense of belonging with British society, uphold their connections with their home country by sending money and goods, providing care and support to family and friends, and maintain social, cultural, personal emotional ties within Turkey and the UK (Bernardi, 2021).

The project aimed to explore the diversity of intimate experiences and practices in family-kin relationships of Turkish migrants. Therefore, diversity in the reasons for moving to the UK, age, occupational background, gender, educational level, relationship status and their interactions with religion and nationality and citizenship are considered essential factors for this study. I interviewed twenty-five transnational Turkish migrants, eleven Turkish men and fourteen women. Participants ages range from 25 to 55 years. The length of settlement of participants in the UK represents diversity; the minimum length of the living period of participants was four years. Ten participants have dual citizenship; fifteen uphold the documented migrant status in the UK. The research participants’ stories reveal that dual citizenship brings more opportunities to engage in transnational activities and build and sustain intimate ties and interpersonal relationships.

I adopted mixed strategies to recruit potential participants, involving snowballing method, advertising the research details to a member of Turkish societies by gatekeepers and personal networks of researchers, and posting online research invitations on networks from Turkish migrants’ communities. The confidentiality and anonymity of both participants and gatekeepers were carefully considered, and pseudonyms were applied throughout the project. Each interview lasted an average of two hours, and was conducted either in Turkish or English, depending upon the participant's preference. I analysed the empirical data with a modified form of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Corbin & Strauss, 1990) and thematic approaches. The analysis process involved three coding stages: initial coding, focused coding and theoretical coding. The modified grounded approach to family practices of migrants is a significant method for the research on transnationalism, social and cultural readjustment, as it enables us to develop an analytical framework to understand the issues and struggles of migrants who enact their lives among different social and religious context. In the final stage of data analysis, I combined the theoretical categories and subcategories with fieldnotes and selected themes. Through the thematic analysis, I captured diverse relational themes and information and drew the interconnections of these empirical data (Guest et al., 2011). This methodological approach and analysis techniques offer new methodological ways of studying migrants’ interpersonal relationships and everyday lives in the host country (Rosenthal, 2012).

In the following sections, I explore three fundamental areas of manufacturing family relationships and intimacy discussed by participants. The themes that emerged from participants’ stories are (a) repairing broken attachments with family and restoring meaningful relationships with family from a distance, (b) (re)manufacturing cultural aspects of family-kin relationships regarding the host country's values and migrant life; and (c) reconciliation of the meaning of family and family practices within local non-kin.

Building meaningful relationships from a distance

In many aspects, migration tests the emotional, cultural and social boundaries in family relationships of migrants. All participants in the study discussed how their intimate connections and family practices are subject to transformation over time depending on their current life experiences in different cultural landscapes. While they negotiated the cultural understanding of family and family relationships as transnational migrants, they talked of how these negotiations capture diverse and positive self-development, and provide opportunities to build intimate fulfilment and relationships with family from a distance.

One significant context that emerged repeatedly was that migration provides the space for all parties to manage cultural norms and expectations about family practices, intimate involvement, and encourages migrants to transform family connections over time and space. Their stories provide critical content for the management process of cultural and social expectations from a distance, generate new intimate ties with family-kin as transnational migrants, and alter the nature of the personal relationships of migrants. Their negotiations involved an examination of the quality and form of intimacy in family practices and the function of gender expectation in family-kin relationships.

Repairing intimacy

While migration suggests mixed ways in which participants sustain intimate ties with family, their stories provide emotional and subjective activities and challenge cultural norms and expectations in their intimate relationships with their family. All participants explained how migration shifts their understanding of intimacy in family relationships. Their family stories significantly suggest how managing cultural expectations, social norms, and boundaries on intimacy with family as a migrant can be recovering for both the person being mobile and the family. This process involves the transformation of intimate connections and practices in the family, as Mehmet and Cengiz elaborate:

… I have a much better relationship with them now [after migrating]. These days it is very nice. I mean very, very nice … There was a period in my life when I had a bad relationship with my family in general … When I was there [Turkey] … could not get engaged with the family and be close to them. Lots of expectations … care, respect; I lived alone there, but … They want to be part of your life all the time. When I moved in abroad, my family relationships improved significantly. So, we are very happy now. I am intimate with my mum and dad. (Mehmet)

[People in Turkey] always pretend like someone else to be accepted. I think now I think of myself first. So, I do not think of my family anymore. I do not actively think of them. Like I stop saying … if I did this, my family, mother, father … would be upset. I started to say what makes me happy. It is a big change for me … that changed my connection with them … in a better way. (Cengiz)

Mehmet explains that intimacy with family was always a complex content because of cultural and social expectations of family relationships before the migration. Although he owned his own living space in Turkey, social and cultural boundaries are still expected to be practised. The family was something physically close, but an emotionally disconnected and distant concept when he was in Turkey. This represents a fundamental feature of the intimacy of the family in the collectivist culture. Cengiz's story also provides a supporting context. His narrative shows how collectivist culture prioritizes the figures of family. Society expects in-groups’ intentions should take over personal goals and developments. Collectivist cultural traits structure and impact on family intimacy of Mehmet, Cengiz and many others. Thus, the cultural and social expectations from personal lives in Turkish culture may create conflict in maintaining subjective feelings, such as closeness and mutual self-disclosure in family connections. Whilst their migration to the UK reversed this situation. After migration, their family relationships and intimacy explicitly improved because they felt freed from those cultural and social expectations. They and their family achieved mutual understanding and mutual appreciation, and began to accept each other unconditionally.

Migration can restore family dynamics and intimacy and offers a new form of familyhood, dependency, independence and identity (Creese et al., 1999). All participants in this study reflected that doing intimacy with family from a distance provides space to work on cultural norms about intimate involvement and family practices. Their negotiations on familyhood consisted of conflicts among dependency and independence, modification of norms about family intimacy based on their current everyday life experiences, and recovering the damages related to disaffected family connections. Melody's story highlights how the physically changing cultural and social environment shifts her family practices:

… When I came here, I had to look after myself. Whatever is available … it helped me be far away … separate issues and problems with my family. … I was keeping revolving. Tried to help do things for them [family]. When I came here, responsibility and other obligations … slowly over gradually … I thought life still went on there. I concentrate on my needs, my things. There were always siblings … needed support financially, emotionally, and could be both sometimes. I helped them when I was there. I provided them all the time. However, things changed when I moved here. (Melody)

Like other participants, Melody highlights cultural and social expectations for practising family in Turkey. After she moved away from her family, she began to work on her family practices and worked on herself. Migration implies the content of alteration for both her self-development and a transformation of understanding of family practices. While she negotiates her family's affection as there and here, she self-interrogates (Giddens, 1992) in terms of figuring out what has changed in her life after migration. Different dynamics can be potential factors, but in Melody's case, negotiating family relationships with family members is a common practice in individualized societies.

Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) and Bauman (2003) discuss the process of individualization and reflexive modernity provide new arrangements for individuals’ personal lives and fragmentations of the group (or class) solidarity, including family and community. Participants’ stories exemplify such a transition in personal life. They explained that family practices are based on cultural norms and expectations that they never questioned when within the culture and society, and migration actively changes the ways they practice intimacy and familyhood from a distance. For participants, the family became something that upholds in-depth attachments, affections, closeness and independence. Participants’ journey from Turkey to England articulated new understandings of family and ‘practising family’ that can be reimagined and re-practised (Morgan, 1996). Their family stories reveal changing social circumstances shift emotions (Smart & Shipman, 2004).

Managing intimacy expectations in family

Participants in this study are located within Turkish and British social spaces, and their transnational lives promote a range of capital, but it also accommodates the tensions among modernity and traditions in their everyday lives. In practice, their lives are shaped and tied by implications of the reproduction of socio-economic status and cultural processes they hope to achieve through migration. Therefore, they engage with continually distinctive economic-cultural and social capitals concerning their education, social positions and gender. This reproduction of socio-cultural capitals and gendered resources challenges gender norms and relations within traditional Turkish families. As Zontini and Reynolds (2018), Guveli et al. (2016) and Cook and Waite (2016) note, when gender expectations are different from sending to receiving country, conflicts in gender relations in migrant families can be one of the results of migration. However, significantly less has been written about how socio-economic and cultural capitals reproduced through migration reverse the gender relations in the family and allow for de-traditionalised intimate connections and family practices with their immediate family-kin and others. Participants’ narratives provide significant insight into how cultural capitals related to gender agency can foster a new form of intimacy in the family. These reconstructed capitals enable them to be critical of the family's cultural context. They renegotiate family by restoring gender norms and expectations in family practices rather than revealing conflicts among home and host societies’ cultural roles in gender. So, in this article, I explore how transnational migrants reconstruct intimacy in family relationships by indicating changes in gender agency in the migration process.

While fundamental cultural norms in gender relations exist in family relationships in Turkish society, all women participants discussed how being a Turkish well-educated migrant woman in the UK helps them to restore their gender relations, expectations and roles in family relationships, and how social and cultural capitals and gender resources reproduced by migration switch the ways participants practice gender roles in the family, and how they offer resources to manage cultural expectations and religious values in family practices. Interestingly, their stories reveal an important discussion on the relationship between migration and restoring intimacy and family practices by arguing about gender relations in the migration context. Fatma discusses this shifting dynamic in gender relations regarding her family practices with her spouse's family.

… [Spouse's family] They are not living here; I am glad they do not. If they lived here, things would be different and complicated. Or if we lived in Turkey, I am sure they would expect many things from us, and we had to do them even if we did not want to. When we visit Turkey … they expect certain things even though they know we are not permeant in Turkey. I do not have any problem with my husband's family, but I do not want to feel like I have to do certain things … simple things like visiting them once a week, calling them, and showing respect to them … . These things are part of our culture. Those cultural things can be tiring; I think living here helps my husband and me to keep in balance those complicated relationships. They also started complimenting my job, my career and telling my husband to help me out with the house and baby care. (Fatma)

Migration can shift the norms about family practices and modify the form and the ways parties do intimacy with family. Like Fatma and many participants highlight marriage can build different forms of intimate networks in Turkish society. Those intimate networks require particular cultural involvement and attachment, such as keeping close affections, providing endless care and respect, calling, and actively being part of the family. Being physically and culturally distant from the family displays family attachments at a manageable level for all participants. However, interestingly, women participants discuss these shifting intimacy practices in the family by emphasizing the transformation of gender roles and expectations in family relationships.

Like Fatma explains that migration minimizes the social and traditional gender roles in families, particularly roles assigned to women, and brings renegotiation of gendered expectations. In Fatma's case, pursuing distinctiveness with her partner's family cancels gelinlik or gelinlik yapmak in her marriage life. Gelinlik or gelinlik yapmak has no English equivalent in terms of both linguistics and social usage. It contains things like the daughter-in-law (the bride) always providing intensive care and respect to her spouse's family members (primarily parents and grandparents) whenever she is nearby, always being expected to stand at attention whenever her partner's elderly family members enter the room, etc. The daughter-in-law is culturally expected to be the primary care and respect provider without question in a traditional Turkish family. As Fatma highlights, if her husband's family lived in the same geography, they would expect her to practise gelinlik and keep their connection at a satisfactory level for the family. However, they do not have to engage with structured family intimacy in Turkish culture because of migration and restructured gender relations. Participants’ stories indicate that being mobile is not only physically being away from the culture, society, religion, and all roles and expectations constructed by those dynamics, but it also balances emotional labours and intimate attachments with family members and relatives. It provides a discourse with the activities that participants utilize their mobility experiences to construct non-traditional intimate attachments in family relationships.

Additionally, their family practices from a distance demonstrate how migrant women internalize their socio-economic and social capitals to restore gender and expectations in family relationships. Bourdieu's (1994) concept of habitus is applicable here. Bourdieu defines habitus as implying the physical embodiment of cultural capital, integrated habits, skills and dispositions we detach because of our life experiences. He suggests habitus can be ‘transposable dispositions, structured structures to function as structuring structure’ (p. 53). Migrants’, in this study, usual social group activities, desires and struggles, and dreams change and restructure through their physical embodiment in British society. They restructure or just act regarding which subjective positions are obtained and which gender identities are introduced (Morrice, 2017; Zontini & Reynolds, 2018). But, particularly, women participants’ social class in the UK re-establishes cultural and social expectations, skills and habits related to their gender identity in their family environment. They restructure their predisposed socio-economic positions by detaching British society and culture. Hence, they renegotiate their gender roles and expectations and their functions in her family practice and attachments. Their reconstructed/ empowered socio-economic position as well-educated professional women living in the UK shifts their dispositions in their families. As Fatma explained her family started considering Fatma as an equal to her husband. Being economically independent and contributing to the family budget switched her position from care and support provider to equal breadwinner. Her immediate family and spouse's family started to agree when she demanded to share house chores and parenting tasks with her husband. Hence, the cultural capital and habitus restructured through migration help migrant women, like women participants in this study, de-traditionalise their gender roles, expectations, family practice, and intimate connections.

Manufacturing of the meaning of family-kinship

While migration provides space for migrants to reconstruct the meaning of family, and negotiate the cultural and societal norms and expectations of family relationships, migrants develop tools to manage conflicts over intimacy practices within the family. Participants’ family relationships provide significant details on how some migrants provide care and support and sustain their intimate practices based on tensions among modernity and tradition.

One fundamental theme that appeared consistently was redefining familyhood and kinship by embracing aspects of new cultures. Practising family-kin is a part of everyday life activity in Turkish society; hence, participants’ relationships with their siblings and relatives represent an interrupted, disembodied or dis-formed intimacy. Living in different geography leads to a significant alteration and negotiation in family-kinship. Thus, all participants’ migration experiences make them critical and reflexive about cultural forms of family-kinship practices. Their narratives reflect how migrants from non-Western societies renegotiate the meaning of family-kinship and practices based on the values of the new culture that enable them to create belonging in Britain.

Falling apart?

In many respects, family-kinship no longer implies any compulsory cultural bonds for migrants in this study. When they migrate, they start working on their emotional cultures and negate their kin connections and practices (Walsh, 2018). For some participants, the lack of sense of co-presence of both parties in everyday life may change or disconnect family-kinship ties. Melody explains how her intimate connections and closeness with her siblings gradually began to fall apart after she began to enact her everyday life apart from them.

… My mum lives in Germany. My dad lives in Turkey. I have a brother who lives in Germany. My other two siblings live in Turkey. We have a bit of a broken family. The relationship, I think, when I kind of more there for them. We had a very close relationship. But it was based on needs. We were kind of close to each other. But it was not balanced. So mine is like that. But, of course, giving, giving, giving … at some point … you need to take as well. That is why I came here; the relationship gradually came down. Then our relationship with my siblings is quite fragile; not very close anymore. We even did not talk anymore. (Melody)

For some participants, family-kinship is something they used to actively display their emotional connections and intimate contact as part of their daily activities. Melody expresses her intimate connections with her siblings by practising closeness, and providing support and care in physical and emotional ways in everyday life. Doing siblingship as part of everyday life practices keeps her connections and closeness with her siblings when she is physically close to them. Melody understands siblingship as a combination of physical and emotional co-presence (Barglowski, 2021; Svašek, 2008). When she and her family members became mobile, they were challenged to keep an intimate connection. There might have been different dynamics that impacted her gradually increasing disaffection of intimacy with her siblings, such as divorced parents and multiple trans-localisation. However, lack of physical co-presence can dis-embody her emotional co-presence with her siblings.

Through transnational experiences, migrants can test the durability of their relationships with family-kin and others. While they negotiate her form of intimacy in family-kin, they are keen to emphasize the dynamics of intimate practices. This brings a realization of the function, form and durability of their relationships. This realization made them decide to sustain or abandoned imbalanced intimate attachments and relationships, as Melody decided.

In some participants’ cases, physical distance creates emotional distance over time and space, transforming kinship relationships into a disaffected connection and meaningless attachment compared to how they used to practice.

I am not keeping pretty much anyone in my life that I do not have meaningful relationships with anymore. And that kind of includes family, relatives … So, I am not like taking them out of my life or whatever. You know … see them from Ramadan aid or whatever. You say hi, you just exchange conversation, but I have 25 cousins. Do I talk to every single one of them? No! Did I talk to them when I was 15? Yes! Of course, because we also lived in the same neighbourhood. But it does not mean that we are in touch. That is just mean … It is okay to say hi once a year rather than once a week. (Mehmet)

Participants’ migration life results in a lack of space to practice their kinship as part of daily life. Sharing special cultural and religious days, national festivals and the opportunity to come across each other in similar places or celebrate important days made them build an intimate connection with their kin and family. Though they sometimes share cultural and religious events, fragments and divisions of such collective group action may not be enough to sustain its core meanings. Multiple participants address this context. Unlike Baldassar et al.'s (2007) definition of transnational family, participants understand family and kinship through a sense of collectivity they practice. They highlight the form of ‘local kinship’ that has a traditional, institutional structure (Gillespie et al., 2014; Walsh, 2018) in Turkey.

Goulbourne et al. (2010) suggest that transnational family practices help us understand how family networks and social capital intersect. For participants in this study, these concepts indicate clear separation rather than an intersection. When they switched the socio-cultural environment, their connections with their family-kin evolved in the intensity of collectiveness and permanence in practice. However, they often commented on how difficult to cope with the feeling of nostalgia. Many of them mentioned the Turkish neighbourhood in Harringay, London, and described it as a small version of Turkey. They stated that whenever they experience a longing for their culture, they visit this Harringay. Having a bit of Turkishness nearby is important for many participants. They define that practising such Turkish cultural authenticity in England endorses their needs in terms of practising cultural identity. This Turkish neighbourhood provides social capital to create a sense of groupness through established networks. Therefore, many participants develop new forms and practices of kinship ‘here’ while negotiating their current connections with their kin in Turkey. Ahmet explains his family-kinship understanding and practices after migration.

I divorced my relatives when I was 20 or 26. My relatives are great; they are well-educated. They are not under-educated or ignorant, or unsupported. But I cut ties with them after I left. If they want to have a relationship with me, they will have to do that like outsiders. I do not give any specific privileges to people who are tied to my blood. (Ahmet)

Family and kin relationships are mostly structured by cultural and social values in Turkey. Having blood ties prioritizes particular activities, such as sustaining compulsory respect, care, support and privacy with family and relatives. However, Ahmet and many other participants did not pursue this cultural fashion of kinship in his connections with his relatives. Participants’ stories reveal that the relationship made by a blood connection can lose meaning and content through migration, and can be recreated with ‘others’ (Żadkowska et al., 2022). For them, kin relationships define the connection, not built-in compulsory ways. On the contrary, they sustain their kinship without inherited connections with others. Interestingly, while participants explain how their relatives have no privilege in their life due to blood connections, they argue about the hierarchy in their intimate relationships. The hierarchy of intimacy in their personal life is shattered. Migrants can build kinship with people they can practice intimacy, closeness and support. Their modified approach to kinship re-emplaces migrants’ emotional culture and kinship, and develops a new conceptual form of kinships, such as chosen family, and kin in the host society.

Localized kinship: families of choice

While I found evidence of reframing the meaning and practices of family and kinship in the host society, friends like family- kin often appears in participants’ narratives. Some participants discussed how friendship becomes more fluid, more important and central to their lives as a source of continuity of intimate connections after the migration (Gotehus, 2022; Guveli et al., 2016). Interestingly, participants explained their local friendships as a form of kinship involve reflexive and critical discussions on the traditional and common understanding of family in Turkish society. Many of them questioned the notion of ‘blood is thicker than water’ while they explained their friendship networks in England. Hale's and Oguz's stories are examples of the content of family by choice.

I always say friends are family that you can choose. Friends that family I chose. So that is mine. I feel like they are (my friends) more family to me than my actual blood-related family. I have more in common; I have more support. They are the people I can talk to. I can trust. If I need help, I can ask. But I cannot do that, my brothers or family. I can definitely do that to my friends. (Hale)

I have many friends that I think are my family here. I have my family of choice here. I have my blood family in Turkey, my parents and my siblings in Turkey. … to be able to trust and depend on them in hard times. I would regret to not having these people and these relationships with them., I have many friends that I can turn to if something happens … if I get ill, I need something. It is trusting in a relationship. (Oguz)

Migration allows Hale, Oguz and others to challenge the cultural forms of family connections through a new form of friendships. It creates something that was not available to them in their family relationships. Family relationships become a form that includes intimate connection, support and commonness among individuals. They move such an intimate connection beyond institutional heteronormative family understanding in the Turkish context. Participants’ local kinships offer negotiations of traditional family values in Turkey and highlight the importance of generating family ties with friends became a significant piece of their lives. The narratives of Beril and Demir explain the sense of reconfiguration of family-kinship locally.

Especially in here. One of my female friends is my family. I consider her a family. She considers me as her family as well. My relationship with her is very complex. Sometimes she acts like my mum; sometimes, she is my big brother and father. Sometimes she is just my female friend. We do not have blood relations, but this is the way how I feel about her.. It is complex and a lot. Like, when we do shopping, she is my father; when she cooks, she becomes my mother. When we share some emotional stuff, she is my close friend. (Beril)

I have.. very special people. I consider them like my family. Because I think they are kind of replace your family. If especially you are not with your family. Family is some people you cannot choose. Friends, they are family you can choose. I think it is mostly human interactions. I share many things with them. I share jokes, foods, talking about struggles, talking about good stuff. (Demir)

For many participants, friendships become a category to compensate for the lack of family practices in England. Their narratives illustrate an example of decentring family relationships and practices within their social and personal lives. Because of their geographical and social distance from their immediate family, they perform their family practices through their current friendships in England. Thus, the concept of friendship as a family is important to substitute and incorporate their friendship into and for their family relationships. Hence, doing family practices with their particular friends is the main criteria for defining them as their family (Spencer & Pahl, 2006). Consequently, these discussions display important reflections concerning what is possible in specific places and conditions for human actions (Rooksby, 2005, p. 22) and reconfiguring the traditional form of family and kinship.

Conclusion

This article provides significant insight into studies of family, relationships, migration and transnational intimate activities by highlighting less scholarly interest in family-kin intimacy and practices within non-western migrant contexts. In doing so, I explore how transnational life affects family-kin practices from a distance, and offers strategies to manufacture meaningful familiar relationships as a result of migration. Participants’ stories reveal that transnational family-kin practices and intimate ties are complex, and can create a new form of intimacy, practices and meaning of family. Although transnational family-kin practices are examined by focusing on the transformative effects of migration on family dynamics (Barglowski, 2021; Gotehus, 2022; Guveli et al., 2016), participants’ narratives demonstrate family practices from a distance involve negotiations and developments underpinned this group of family's relationships (Cook & Waite, 2016; Zontini & Reynolds, 2018). In many cases, participants’ intimacy and family practices are re-embodied through migration experiences and new and old geographical contexts. However, these changes do not merely reflect the conflict in family-kin practices and shifting boundaries in relationships. Instead, they empower migrants to be critical and reflexive about the cultural values of family and gender expectations in relationships. They utilize migration as a useful tool to repair broken attachments with family and restore meaningful relationships with family-kin from a distance. Thus, family-kin practices and intimacy can be manufactured and developed in compelling ways through migration.

Migration can test the emotional, cultural and social expectations in family-kin relationships. Thus, through migration, family-kin intimacy and practices are reimagined and reconfigured. It may allow migrants to acknowledge and perform cultural norms and expectations that they were entitled to before migration. Goulbourne et al. (2010) argue ‘most individuals are involved in ties and responsibilities that require ongoing negotiations rather than in loose relationships that can be left when they become difficult’ (p. 136). So, embodied intimate experiences and emotional processes among transnational family members shift the idea of family practices they used to have (Svašek, 2008; Walsh, 2018). Sustaining intimacy with their families reflexively transforms their family relationships because mobility tests intimacy's emotional, cultural and social boundaries. Thus, I consider participants’ physical co-presence may alter their intimate closeness and family and kinship practices. Living apart provides participants and their family and kin space to work on cultural and social expectations and develop a positive perspective on practising intimacy in family and kinship. Intimate ties from a distance can challenge norms about intimate involvement in family-kin relationships. In this context, I argue that being mobile is physically being away from the culture, society, religion, and all roles and expectations constructed by those dynamics. But it also balances emotional labours and intimate attachments with family members and relatives.

Different family-kin practices, including siblings, relatives and kinship with others, seem to be influenced by transnational migration. New social circumstances transform how participants practise intimacy in family-kin. While their lives are shaped and tied by implications of the reproduction of socio-economic status and cultural processes they hope to achieve through migration, they also engage with continually distinctive economic-cultural capital concerning their education, social positions and gender (Zontini & Reynolds, 2018). These reconstructed capitals enable them to be critical about the family's cultural context and reimagine the meaning of family with non-kin (Walsh, 2018). While participants reconfigure family-kin practices with non-kin locally, they exercise two practices. First, they demonstrate they have the flexibility to reconstruct their relationships in a blended form. They shift their common family-kin practices by building those connections with their friends. Second, they illustrate that migration offers the opportunity to them to build something that was not available to them before the migration process while building a familiar connection with their local friends. Gotehus (2022) and Żadkowska et al. (2022) note intimacy in family-kin relationships can be recreated with ‘other’ through migration, which becomes central to their lives. Participants’ family ties with non-kin demonstrate how diasporic and migrant communities understand and reassess the meanings of friendship and family-kin ties differently compared to non-migrants. Consequently, participants’ experiences move such theoretical discussions of the family of choice beyond the Western and community contexts. In migrant or diasporic communities, friendships can be framed and understood as more family-like, or migrants can generate family ties with non-kin through their migration process.

Based on these discussions, I argue that transnational experiences foster new ways of thinking about family-kin practices and intimacy that can be reimagined and re-practised through the social-cultural and geographical transition. Migration can be employed in analytical strategies to understand the family-kin practices of migrants and reveal the usefulness of mobility in repairing and developing intimacy in the family. I consider these arguments as a critical topic for the British migration agenda, particularly during the post-Brexit. Arguably, the cultural values, religious norms and gender roles in family-kin relationships can be demanding for non-Western migrants’ communities. Migration can function as a useful tool to rebuild emotional geographies and create a sense of secure belonging in new societies. Therefore, it is important to know how migrants understand migration, employ the mobility process to practice family-kin intimacy and build/restore meaningful relationships across borders as these activities inform their everyday lives and connections with non-migrants in host societies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).