Where have all the fathers gone? Remarks on feminist research on transnational fatherhood

ABSTRACT

Research on transnational relations has been increasing over the last two decades. Since 1997, when the notion of ‘transnational motherhood’ was investigated by Avila and Hondagneu-Sotelo, many scholars have considered how parents arrange their parenthood across borders. This article explores how social scientists examine male migrants as fathers. We review empirical work on the migration of men and explore how transnational fatherhood has been examined, understood, and utilized in feminist research. We ask ‘Where have all the fathers gone?’ and evaluate feminist conceptualizations of transnational fatherhood over the last two decades. We organize our discussion around three stages of feminist research on transnational migrant fatherhood. These stages are: (1) discovery of unseen transnational fatherhood, (2) conceptualization of breadwinning transnational fatherhood, and (3) shift to conceptualization of caring transnational fatherhood. These three stages depict the changing content of the notions of transnational fatherhood. The article contributes to current research on transnational families and feminist research on migrant men. We show how gendered norms and stereotypes prevail in migration research and the ways in which they are inscripted in how scholars approach the male migration experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational fatherhood
• breadwinning
• caregiving

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Adéla Souralová is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and the Office for Population Studies at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. She specialises in research on paid care and migration and, in particular, on the family relationships of Vietnamese immigrants in the Czech Republic. The findings of her research on Vietnamese immigrant families that hire native Czech nannies were published in a book titled New perspectives on mutual dependency in care-giving by Ashgate (2015).

Hana Fialová is taking the MA programme in Sociology at the Department of Sociology at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic.

Notes

1. This was exactly 10 years after the concept of transnational motherhood was introduced. In 2007, this article already had 300 citations in Google Scholar Database and 80 citations in Web of Science.

2. Our review is limited to English-language publications due to our language knowledge. Our analytical procedure was as follows: we collected a set of articles after searching for the keywords ‘transnational fatherhood’ or ‘transnationalism and fatherhood’ (in both cases, the keywords were entered first with quotation marks and then without them) in selected databases (Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar); then we analysed the ways that the term transnational fatherhood and its content are conceptualized by researchers. Our set of articles included studies written about migrants in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia. We are aware that practices of transnational parenthood differ in various geographical, historical, and sociocultural contexts. We expect differences in fathering among fathers of different classes, races, religions, ages, etc. However, the current limited research on transnational fatherhood does not make it possible to answer the questions of how and why fathering practices differ among men of different backgrounds.

Additional information

Funding

This research was financially supported by student research project ‘Society and its dynamics: qualitative and quantitative perspective’, project num. MUNI/A/1182/2016.