Re-learning to be a woman: virtual space and post-migration womanhood in the Somali diaspora

ABSTRACT

Upon migrating, gender ideologies, performances, and relationships are transformed. However, little work has examined how information and communication technologies facilitate this transformation for immigrant women. In this article, drawing on observations of a Somali women created and led phone line and interviews with founders, moderators, and participants on this space, I consider how Somali immigrant women utilise virtuality to create a unique diasporic space in which they learn and practice the new identity of ‘immigrant woman’, distinct from the womanhood of their homeland or hostland. I argue that the reconfiguration of their womanhood post-migration is actively developed and negotiated communally through innovative community building and highlight how women specifically benefit from the scale and scope of a decentralised and virtual diaspora. Focusing on the domain of motherhood, I show how virtual space allows for a communal learning and negotiation of arising tensions. These findings illuminate the process underlying gendered immigrant integration.

KEYWORDS:

• gender
• Somali
• diaspora
• womanhood

Acknowledgements

I thank Tomás Jiménez, Shelley Correll, and members of various workshops and conferences for their helpful feedback. I also am immensely grateful to the participants of this project for their time and generosity.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I observed a few other phone conferences that I received from interviewees to determine if there were significant differences. Some were focused on particular topics (e.g. religion or politics), but most were generalist like this one and similarly composed of all women. I focus all analyses on one phone conference, Somali Women’s Space (SWS).

2 While I cannot be sure of the country makeup of participants as these data are not collected and are only guessed at by the moderators and founders I spoke with, I kept track of changing numbers of participation throughout the day to estimate which regions were most prevalent. The phone line is most active (with around 1500 participants) on weekdays at around 5pm ET, and weekends at around 11am ET, suggesting that these are mostly North American users. There were also spikes of participation (although never reaching the maximum of the other spike) around 11am ET on weekdays, suggesting that European participation was second largest.

3 Plans for observations, interviews, and consent were approved by the Institutional Review Board at Stanford University (under protocol number 57877).

4 I focus on motherhood as a site of tension in the aftermath of migration, but two other domains were especially salient: religion and the role of men. While I do not explore those here in depth, I recognise their importance to the lives of Somali immigrant women (Abdi 2014, 2015; Kapteijns 1995; Liberatore 2016). Religious life and practice were a large point of discussion on SWS, and while men were not participants on SWS and I did not directly interview any, their changing roles and expectations post-migration provided a backdrop to many discussions of womanhood on SWS.