The gendered burden of transnational care-receiving: Sudanese families across The Netherlands, the UK and Sudan

Abstract

Care circulated within transnational families is a crucial element in the families’ social protection and reproduction transnational social protection arrangements, based on a system of reciprocity between migrants and their families ‘back home’. Recent studies have shown the complexities of transnational caregiving arrangements, yet the focus has remained on the provision of care between parents and children, largely neglecting the intricacies of care-receiving within extended family networks. Care may feel differently depending on the perspective of either the provider or the receiver. Despite the caregiver’s good intentions, care might be experienced as a burden by the receiver. Moreover, as a culturally embedded practice, receiving care across culturally and geographically distant contexts may present additional challenges. This paper investigates the agency of female care-receivers to navigate the care provided by different male family members abroad, while protecting themselves and their children’s wellbeing. Rather than focusing on caregiving practices between parents and children, this article addresses care dynamics within extended families. Drawing on a multi-sited matched-sample ethnography with Sudanese transnational families across the Netherlands, the UK and Sudan, I examine the strategies of these women to manoeuvre the reception of unwanted care while avoiding conflict with their relatives and gaining control of their own and their children’s bodies. In exploring the intricacies of care-receiving in transnational family networks, I analyse how geographical distance may exacerbate the perception of different care needs, while at the same time giving the care-receivers more space to navigate the reception of unsolicited care.

Keywords:

• Care-receiving
• transnational families
• transnational social protection care
• Sudan
• the UK
• the Netherlands

Introduction

Families play a crucial role in the provision of care to different family members in need. Grandparents taking care of grandchildren, parents taking back their unemployed adult children without resources, or aging parents moving in with their children to be taken care of—these are only some examples of how care circulates within families. Especially in countries with weak or non-existent welfare systems, like Sudan, the reciprocal and multi-directional circulation of care (Baldassar and Merla 2014) and other resources within extended families is crucial for the family’s social protection and reproduction. Nowadays, however, an increasing number of people live separated from their families across national borders, which inevitably has an impact on the intergenerational circulation of care and support. International migration does not necessarily sever the obligations and responsibilities between family members living apart (Baldassar, Baldock, and Wilding 2007; Baldassar and Merla 2014). On the contrary, members of transnational families maintain a sense of ‘family-hood’ (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002), in that they ‘retain their sense of collectivity and kinship despite being spread across multiple nations’ (Baldassar, Baldock, and Wilding 2007: 13). Whereas the exchange of face-to-face care is not always possible, care work continues to be at the core of transnational families (Coe 2011; Poeze, Dankyi, and Mazzucato 2017; Baldassar, Baldock, and Wilding 2007).

For the purposes of this article, care is defined as a reciprocal, asymmetrical and multi-directional process (Baldassar and Merla 2014) ‘that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our “world” [including] our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’ (Fisher and Tronto 1990: 40). As an intrinsic part of many social relationships, care goes beyond the performance of intimate personal activities for another person (e.g. bathing, dressing, or preparing meals) and it includes everyday acts of practical and emotional support, which are better described as the proactive interest of one person in the well-being of another (Wiles 2011). Moreover, care is a culturally embedded process where both caregivers and care-receivers do not just act out of self-interest but ‘as the result of the particular constellation of caring relationships and institutions within which they find themselves’, including families, welfare states, and the market (Tronto 1995: 142). Therefore, judgements made about care arise out of people’s experiences and gendered expectations of collective institutions, such as the family (Tronto 1995).

Just like in geographically close families, transnational care relations are embedded within, produce and reproduce unequal power relations, influenced by gender, age and socio-economic status (Baldassar and Merla 2014). Transnational caregiving refers to the ways in which people care for each other across national borders. It is based on a series of relationships of obligation, trust and commitment concerned with the well-being of others, developed and negotiated over time, in line with rules of generalised reciprocity, namely, the expectation and obligation that care will be returned, regardless of when or in which form (Baldassar and Merla 2014; Krzyżowski and Mucha 2014; Sahlins 1965; Seltzer and Li 1996). In binding family members together in intergenerational networks of reciprocity and obligation, love and trust, transnational caregiving is simultaneously fraught with tension, contest and unequal power relations, where care is not given or received equally by all family members (Baldassar and Merla 2014).

The care conducted between family members living across national borders is an integral part of transnational social protection (TSP) mechanisms, based on links of reciprocity and obligation that families engage in (Serra-Mingot and Mazzucato 2019). Yet, to date, the complexities of transnational caregiving arrangements have been predominantly addressed by transnational family scholarship. Global care-chain literature (Parreñas 2001; Hochschild 2000) and recent studies on ‘care circulation’ (Baldassar and Merla 2014) have analysed the myriad of family arrangements undertaken across national borders to provide care, highlighting the gendered nature of care, whereby women often carry a heavier burden to provide care (Poeze, Dankyi and Mazzucato 2017; Kilkey 2014; Spitzer et al. 2003; Baldassar and Merla 2014). Yet, with a few notable exceptions (see Madianou and Miller 2011), most of these studies have focused on the emotional and financial burdens experienced by caregivers, overshadowing the implications of care-receiving.

Care, however, looks and feels different depending on the perspectives of the provider and the receiver, and it has the potential to oppress both (Bondi 2008; Dankyi, Mazzucato and Manuh 2017; Locke 2017). Although care-giving is inherently meant to be a ‘good thing’, receiving care can actually be experienced as oppressing and disabling, whereby care-recipients are subject to paternalistic over-protection, demand for gratitude and control, in the name of care (Bondi 2008; Russell, Bunting and Gregory 1997; Smith 2016). To date, mostly nursing and disability scholars have addressed the role of care-receivers in different face-to-face caring processes. As these studies show, care-receivers do play an active role in managing the unwanted consequences of care, in what Cynthia Russell coined as ‘protective care-receiving’ (1997). This gap in the literature of transnational families should be addressed because the perceptions of care may significantly differ between those delivering care and those receiving it, especially when care-work takes place across geographically distant contexts.

Drawing on ethnographic data collected during 14 months of multi-sited and partly matched-sample fieldwork with Sudanese transnational families across the Netherlands, the UK and Sudan, I investigated women’s agency and strategies in navigating the reception of unsolicited care provided by family members abroad. A multi-sited matched-sample approach provides insights into the multi-actor process of care, and allows for a better understanding of the different perceptions of care (Poeze, Dankyi and Mazzucato 2017). Bringing together literature of transnational families, social protection and migration and nursing studies, this paper looks into how migrant and non-migrant female care-receivers navigate the burdensome care provided by their relatives abroad. Instead of focusing on the migrants as care-givers and those ‘left behind’ as care-receivers, or the other way around, the article concentrates on how female members of transnational families deal with the unwanted consequences of care-receiving, from the two different standpoints, namely as migrants and as non-migrants or ‘left behind’. I draw on the concept of ‘protective care-receiving’ to analyse the agency of care-receivers in transnational caring processes, not only by manoeuvring unsolicited care through different strategies, but also by avoiding conflict and gaining control of their and their children’s wellbeing.

The next section provides a comprehensive overview of transnational caring processes, focusing on the aspect of care-receiving, while addressing the cultural and gendered dimensions of care in the Sudanese context in particular. After presenting the data and methodology of this study, I introduce the three cases and analyse the different strategies in which care-receivers navigate care within the family network. The final section concludes.

Transnational care-receiving in transnational social protection arrangements

The care conducted between family members living across national borders is an integral part of the TSP arrangements, based on complex links of reciprocity and obligation that families engage in (Dankyi, Mazzucato and Manuh 2017). Yet, studies of social protection and migration have rarely incorporated literature on care. The bulk of studies tends to focus on the migrant’s access to formal social protection in the receiving countries and its implications for the migrants’ wellbeing (see Sabates-Wheeler and Waite 2003). Although these studies acknowledge the importance of informal social protection, they mainly conceive it in terms of filling the gaps of the formal system from a financial perspective (e.g. migrants’ informal remittances) (ibid.). Recently, transnational migration scholars have started to bring the literature of care into conversation with TSP literature, illustrating how socio-cultural norms about who should provide care and how, shape the way in which formal and informal social protection resources are accessed and circulated Serra-Mingot and Mazzucato 2019). Rather than filling the gap of formal social protection, informal arrangements are sometimes perceived as more viable or appropriate to cover for specific needs, especially the provision of care (Bilecen and Barglowski 2015).

Caring practices across national borders have been mostly theorised within the field of transnational family studies (Baldassar and Merla 2014). Global care chain literature (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1992; Parreñas 2001; Hochschild 2000) and recent studies on care circulation have analysed different family transnational caring arrangements undertaken across national borders, highlighting the circular character of care, which fluctuates over the life course within transnational family networks (Baldassar and Merla 2014; Poeze, Dankyi, and Mazzucato 2017). Recently, transnational migration scholars have also started to bring the literature of care into conversation with transnational social protection studies, showing how the care conducted between family members living across national borders is an integral part of the social protection arrangements, based on complex links of reciprocity and obligation that families engage in (Dankyi, Mazzucato and Manuh 2017). In doing so these studies have shown how often the provision of intra-familial care is perceived as more viable or appropriate to cover for specific needs, as compared to other formal state-based provisions (e.g. old-age or post-partum professional care) (Bilecen and Barglowski 2015; Serra-Mingot and Mazzucato 2019). Moreover, these studies have also made an invaluable contribution in illustrating how socio-cultural norms about who should provide care and how, shape the way in which formal (e.g. state, market and third sector) and informal (e.g. families and social networks) social protection resources are accessed and circulated (Vivas-Romero 2017; Serra-Mingot and Mazzucato 2019).

While acknowledging the shifting roles from caregivers to care-receivers and mapping multiple caregiving configurations (Kilkey and Merla 2014; Baldassar and Merla 2014), these studies on transnational caregiving and social protection have mostly focused on the caregiving activities, leaving aside the implications of what it means to receive care (see exceptions: Madianou and Miller 2011, Zickgraf 2017). Caregivers are thus seen as the main active actors carrying the burden of delivering care to relatively passive care-receivers. Moreover, although care work involves a series of human experiences, which also include the able-bodied (Yeates 2005), the bulk of this research has tended to focus on caregiving activities towards dependent (grand)children or aging (grand)parents (Fresnoza-Flot 2014; Poeze and Mazzucato 2014).

Rather than being a mere ‘one-way’ process of someone giving face-to-face care to a dependant other, care relationships cover a wide range of activities characterised by reciprocity and interdependence, whereby caregiver and care-receiver are interconnected and care for each other in practical and emotional ways (Tronto 1993; Sevenhuijsen 1998). Especially in a transnational context where face-to-face support is not always possible, it is important to conceptualise care as an ongoing process that involves not only taking the needs of others as the basis for action, but also evaluating the extent to which the care provided meets the actual needs (Tronto 1995; Fisher and Tronto 1990). Indeed, care is a process made up of four intertwined phases: ‘caring about’ or recognizing a need for care; ‘taking care of’ or assuming the responsibility to respond to that specific need; ‘care-giving’ or the actual physical work of providing care; and ‘care-receiving’ or the responsiveness or evaluation of how well the care provided has met the caring need (Fisher and Tronto 1990).

Although care is commonly meant to be a ‘good thing’, receiving care may actually be experienced as oppressing, whereby care-recipients are subject to over-protection and control (Bondi 2008; Smith 2016). Nursing and disability scholars have shown that giving and receiving care is often instilled with dependence, revealing a certain degree of acceptance of the role of being more or less capable (Russell, Bunting, and Gregory 1997; Shakespeare 2000; Wood 1991; Watson et al. 2004). Inextricably bound up with human vulnerabilities and the connections thereby, caring relationships are emotionally complex and they reflect experiences of power dynamics (Bondi 2008; Locke 2017). To some extent, conflict is unavoidable between caregivers and care-receivers because the definition of ‘need’ might not equally satisfy both parties. Agreeing on what ‘need’ means becomes more difficult in relationships with bigger differences in power (such as gender relations), especially when such relationships take place across culturally and geographically distant places. Perceptions of needs may be wrong, and even if they are correct, ‘[c]are‐receivers might have different ideas about their needs [and] may want to direct, rather than simply be passive recipients of caregiving’ (Tronto 1993:109).

Nursing and disability studies have shown that care-receivers do play an active role in managing the care they receive, protecting themselves and others against the unwanted consequences of care. Cynthia Russell coined this process as ‘protective care-receiving’, defined as the efforts of the care-receiver ‘to defend her/himself from problems associated with receiving care and shielding others from difficulties they could experience as caregivers’ (Russell 1993: 184). In their study, Russell and colleagues show how, through different strategies (e.g. cancelling appointments, controlling one’s medical treatments or educating themselves about treatments), care-receivers actively shape the caregiving process and protect themselves or others from the unwanted consequences of care, while maintaining a certain degree of autonomy and control over care interactions (Russell 1997). Drawing on the notion of ‘protective care receiving’, the cases presented in this article illustrate how care-receivers in different contexts navigate the reception of care provided by relatives abroad. In doing so, they are not only protecting themselves, but also avoiding conflict with their extended families, who are the main providers of social protection in the Sudanese context.

Care as a culturally embedded practice: women’s bodies and social protection in Sudan

As a socio-culturally embedded practice, care cannot be understood in the abstract. Care depends on cultural notions of gender roles relating to rights and obligations to give and receive care, whereby men and women are expected to behave according to the appropriate gender roles prevalent in a specific society (Nguyen, Zavoretti and Tronto 2017; Mazzucato and Schans 2011). Therefore, in analysing the lived experiences of those giving and receiving care, it is crucial to understand the role of context, where structures and power-relations impact the difficult moral decisions and the practical tasks of care (Barnes 2012).

Particularly in countries with weak social-welfare systems, such as Sudan, informal networks of support, especially extended families play a key role in the sustenance of society and the provision of material, social and emotional support in times of need or crisis (e.g. unemployment, sickness or old-age) (Mokomane 2013). Research conducted with Sudanese families showed that the individual perception of the family is that of an entity of ‘respect and understanding following a common interest, which is the well-being and status of the family’ (Schultz et al. 2008: 5). At the same time, however, each individual family member is responsible for protecting and sustaining the family in socially and culturally specific ways (Mokomane 2013).

Sudan can be described as a patriarchal society, whereby different social institutions and practices institutionalise the physical, social and economic power of men over women and children in the family. Especially since the introduction of the Sharia Law in 1983, religion has increasingly shaped gender norms and defined the role of men and women in society. Women are mainly identified with their reproductive roles, namely childbearing, childrearing and nurturing. The ideal Sudanese woman, thus, should remain at home to take care of herself, her children, her home, her husband and her family’s reputation (Oldfield-Hayes 1975; Ouis 2009). Male family members are traditionally expected to be the main breadwinners and actively protect the honour and dignity of their families, which implies the control of other family members’ behaviour, mostly women and children (Schlytter and Linell 2010; Nageeb 2004; Smith 2016). In patriarchal societies, a woman's virtue is crucial to the honour of her family, especially to the men responsible for her (Cindoglu 1997). Although with some and increasing exceptions, women’s lives develop under a constant male guardianship. Before marriage, women are legally under the control and care of their fathers and brothers. Even after marriage, when women also become accountable to their husbands, their immediate male kin retain moral responsibility for their welfare and the right to allocate the woman's reproductive potential (Boddy 1989).These men thus share the responsibility to protect women and the consequences of whatever happens to her (Schneider 1971). This is why controlling family members can be understood as an act of care provided for the sake of the individual and the group (Smith 2016).

In traditional kinship societies, with weak welfare states and where many economic activities are based on trust, keeping the family honour has important socioeconomic and political implications for families’ social protection and reproduction. A family maintaining strict control over their women benefits from a good reputation in the community, which has economic implications (Ouis 2009; Cindoglu 1997). In these contexts, honour has the economic and material functions of maintaining the wealth within the family. Indeed, when economic capital is missing, honour can also be seen as symbolic or social capital, understood as ‘the advantage created by a person's location in a structure of relationships and implies status and connections in social networks’ (Ouis 2009: 454).

In the cases presented here, care practices must be understood within this specific context, whereby the lack of a strong welfare state is filled by the family. Drawing on literature on migration and social protection, transnational caregiving, and nursing and disability studies, this article analyses how female care-receivers situated in different contexts manoeuvre the reception of care provided by their male relatives abroad. In interpreting the dynamics of caring relationships as a crucial element in the social protection and reproduction of transnational families, the article points to a series of power imbalances related to aspects of gender, age and socio-economic status of the actors involved.

Data and methods

Conducting transnational research comes with the challenge of having to deal with relationships between people living in separate geographical realms. A multi-sited matched-sample approach allows the researcher to overcome this issue by collecting information from both sides—the migrants and their families back home—, which provides invaluable insights about transnational family relations (Mazzucato 2009). By hearing the two sides of the story, I could understand the position of the migrants and those left behind in the handling of complex family relations in the provision of social protection (especially care), or the inability to do so.

For many respondents, revealing family-related information was highly sensitive, whereby I had to invest long periods of time to build trust. Two main aspects related to my positionality, vis a vis my respondents’, facilitated access to the migrants and their families. First, as a young female researcher, I was perceived as ‘harmelss’, which facilitated accessibility to the migrants’ and their families’ homes in Sudan—often dominated by women. Second, the fact that I spoke Arabic and had studied in a female University in Sudan—where many respondents had a relative studying—gave me a commonality with my respondents that created a closer relationship.

Conducting multi-sited matched-sample research involved several ethical considerations. Often family members provided me information that was unknown to other relatives. Managing this information without conveying personal ‘secrets’ or grudges on either side was emotionally burdensome, and required careful strategies not to disclose information to family members and not break my promise of confidentiality and anonymity to my respondents, which I ensured throughout the research. In this article I anonymised names, locations and other tell-tale details to protect my respondents, their families and their relations.

This study is based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Sudanese migrants in the Netherlands and the UK and their families back in Sudan during 2015–16. My main methods of data collection were: in-depth biographic interviews, informal conversations and observations with 21 respondents in the Netherlands, 22 in the UK and 19 of the migrants’ matched family members (mostly parents and siblings) in Sudan. I conducted all interviews in English or Arabic, in familiar environments for the respondents, mostly their homes. Interviews lasted between two and four hours, while observations ranged in duration and involved attending events with participants such as concerts and family reunions, to spending a full week living with them in their homes. Research participants were recruited through multiple gatekeepers and snow-ball sampling. The sample included roughly half men and half women, who ranged in age from their early twenties to late fifties, including single men, married couples and divorced parents with children. The respondents’ educational background varied, although the majority had a university degree from Sudan. This can be explained by the fact that the Sudanese middle class was the main target of the Islamist regime after the coup (Abusabib 2007).

Protective care-receiving in a transnational context

I begin this section with three vignettes that illustrate how women in different contexts and transnational family networks experience and navigate the care provided by their male relatives when facing—or being perceived to face—particular needs related to their childbearing or childrearing tasks. I have chosen these particular cases because they illustrate the complexities of care-receiving in transnational families, whereby receiving care might be problematic for both migrants and non-migrants. While much attention has been given to the burdens women experience as care-givers, these cases show that care-receiving is also a burdensome and gendered process. Whereas some of the care dynamics illustrated were also observed in other cases in this research, these three cases encompass the two main analytical points of this paper, namely: the different perception of care needs across distant social protection contexts, and the degrees to which the position of the female care-receivers—in terms of being or not a migrant and their capacity to access other resources—shapes their power to navigate the reception of unsolicited care. Rather than making any empirical generalization, these cases are relevant for showing the complexities of care-receiving in a transnational context.

After the vignettes, I discuss how these women deploy different strategies to navigate family caring processes. While taking control over their own bodies, and protecting themselves and their children from the unwanted consequences of care, all three women avoid conflict with their caregivers and their families. My argument underscores that the performance of caring roles in transnational families is filled with contradictions and conflict, whereby geographical and sociocultural distances, together with the resources available and the capacity to access them, shape the ways in which female care-receivers engage in negotiations and exercise their agency to circumvent care.

Talia (37) – postponing the reception of care through distance

Talia is one of the sisters of Ashraf (42), a Sudanese refugee in Europe. During my fieldwork there, Ashraf hosted me in his house as I conducted interviews in his city. Every evening, after I finished my interviews and he returned from his informal job as a security guard, we had dinner together and he would tell me stories about his extended family ‘back home’ in a remote village in Eastern Sudan. The shine in his eyes every time he talked about them, especially his mother and sisters, showed his love for them. Come what may, Ashraf spent every single Friday evening calling his parents and siblings, giving business advice to his brothers, orchestrating new living arrangements for elderly family members in need of care, pressuring younger siblings to perform good at school, or simply checking that everybody was doing fine.

Besides his close contact with his family and his participation in collective decision-making processes, Ashraf also sent them money regularly. Part of this money went to help his sister Talia to go through a fertilization treatment. After having been married for several years, she could not get pregnant, so Ashraf had been paying for an expensive treatment—including several operations—to help her fulfil her wish to become a mother.

Some months later, almost by the end of my fieldwork in Sudan, I was fortunate to meet Talia in Khartoum, after she returned from her four-month stay at her parents’ home in her native village to recover from the last unsuccessful operation. Although Talia had initially gone for a short break, she had in fact over-extended her stay by four months in her native village, hundreds of kilometres away from the hospitals in Khartoum.

I visited Talia in her house in Khartoum, which she shared with other male relatives. Soon after we started talking, Ashraf called her to ask how she was doing. It was a Friday. After having lunch, Talia invited me to go and rest with her in her bedroom. To my surprise, as we lay on the bed, she told me about her pregnancy issue. In the last year, she had had surgery five times, the last of which had taken over five hours and had left her in a very bad state. She lifted her toub and showed me a massive and messy scar stretching vertically from her belly button down to her pubis and horizontally to her hipbones. Although she wanted to become a mother, she was tired of trying and did not want to go through having surgery again, but she felt pressured by the financial efforts made by her husband and especially Ashraf.

Fatima (40) – preventing the unwanted consequences of care through medical surgery

Fatima arrived in the Netherlands as a refugee in the mid-1990s. Like many single refugee women travelling alone, she quickly met and married a Sudanese asylum seeker in the camp, with whom she had a child, Haisam. In 2005, after divorcing her husband and not being able to find a job, Fatima moved to the UK with her son, where she raised him alone. Although she soon found a well-paid job and was able to take care of Haisam, for whom she also received welfare support, ever since her divorce Fatima had lived under the constant pressure from her father and brothers pushing her either to re-marry again or come ‘back home’, as traditionally expected from divorced women in Sudan. None of these options was in Fatima’s plans.

To cope with the pressure from her relatives, Fatima took a very drastic decision. Several years before, she had been diagnosed with ovarian cysts, and when she decided to undergo surgery to have them removed, she requested to have both her ovaries removed as well. In the event that she could not withstand her family’s pressure to remarry, she reasoned, at least she would be able to avoid having more children out of an unwanted relationship.

Besides her marital status, Fatima’s family was also concerned about Haisam. During the time I spent at her house, it was a rare day when she did not receive a call from her father or brothers to check up on her and Haisam. At the time, he had decided to pursue an artistic career rather than go to university. Whereas Fatima was not too worried about it and wanted to give him the chance to explore other options, her family strongly disapproved of Haisam’s decision. Fatima told me that her father in Sudan, as well as her brothers across Sudan, the Netherlands and the Gulf, would call Haisam almost every day to persuade him to go to university. One day, even I received a call from one of her brothers, whom I knew from my fieldwork, asking me to intervene in the issue. To protect her son against the strong family pressure, Fatima would often tell them that Haisam was asleep or not at home whenever they called.

Suheila (58) – ensuring her preferred type of care through calculated family negotiations

Suheila and her four daughters came to the Netherlands in 2002, following her husband who got a job at a Dutch university. Soon after her arrival, Suheila also found a job at the university. Sometime before the end of her husband’s contract, Suheila decided to return to Sudan with her daughters, where her husband would later join them. One of their daughters, Huda, was disabled. She attended special schools in the Netherlands and received assistance from different organisations, but in Sudan she had trouble coping with her disability, after which Suheila decided to return to the Netherlands again.

At the time, her husband found a new job that required him to spend long periods abroad. Although this job allowed him financially to support his family, Suheila now had to run the household on her own. In view of this situation, her four brothers, who lived in the UK at the time, came to the Netherlands to talk her into moving to the UK, arguing that British schools for children with special needs were better, and that they themselves and other relatives would be there to help her taking care of her daughters.

For Suheila, however, moving to the UK, where several of her extended family members lived, did not seem like a good idea. Although she appreciated her brothers’ concern and good intentions, she feared that in the UK she would also have to fulfil multiple social commitments, which would inevitably divert her attention from Huda. Still, Suheila acknowledged and valued the care her extended family had provided to her and her daughters in times of need. By staying in the Netherlands, Suheila nevertheless felt she had more freedom to take her own decisions and manage her time as she saw fit, while the proximity of the UK allowed a certain level of involvement by her brothers in raising and caring for her daughters. Indeed, some years before, Suheila had had the opportunity to move to the US, where Huda had received funding to attend a special school. Yet, she decided against it, because it was too far from her family.

Circumventing her brothers’ requests to move to the UK in a non-conflictive way was all but easy. As one of her older brothers told her: ‘We have to make sure where [Huda] is going… and if we don’t find it is the most appropriate, I’m afraid you may need to change your plans.’ In response, Suheila had to convince them that life in the Netherlands was the best option for her and Huda. To do so, she arranged a meeting between her brothers and the director of Huda’s school, who also contributed to persuading Suheila’s brothers. Despite the pressure, Suheila described the full week that her brothers spent in the Netherlands ‘inspecting’ the schools and the general environment, as ‘family support’. When I asked her about her husband’s opinion and role in all the negotiations, she explained that he agreed with her brothers’ behaviour. They were family, after all, who wanted the best for her and Huda.

Perceiving care across different social protection contexts

The vignettes presented above show how care, as a gendered and culturally embedded practice leads to differing perceptions of needs, especially when caregivers and care-receivers live in geographically and culturally distant places with different social protection systems. Given the difficulties to provide face-to-face care, recognising the need of support (‘caring about’) and taking responsibility to provide it (‘taking care of’) are essential in the sustenance of transnational caring processes. However, the perception of such needs and the way to address them might conflict with the care-receiver’s interests.

In the case of Talia, her brother Ashraf perceived her infertility problem as a crucial need. In the Sudanese context, children are the most reliable source of insurance, especially during old-age (Serra-Mingot and Mazzucato 2019). Based on deeply rooted norms of intergenerational reciprocity, children are expected to care for their parents when they are old and sick. In realising Talia’s need, Ashraf expressed genuine care for her. Apart from perceiving the need for care, Ashraf also made the assessment that this need should be met, based on Talia’s initial wishes to get pregnant and the idea of the value of children for Talia and the family’s wellbeing. Therefore, he took the responsibility to do something about it, by arranging an expensive medical treatment for her. While the perception of need was correct—Talia initially wanted to become a mother—the way in which Ashraf chose to meet his sister’s need put her through excruciating physical pain. Although she wanted a baby, she was also tired of suffering and was ready to either live without children or adopt one of her sisters’ children. But she felt she could not tell this to her brother because of all the efforts and money he invested in her.

Being thousands of kilometres away, Ashraf could not assess first-hand the impact of his support. Seeing the result of multiple operations on his sister’s health and body might have resulted in exploring other reproductive options. Moreover, his economic situation in Europe, although far from buoyant, had given him the necessary financial resources to facilitate medical interventions. As Ashraf explained, the salary of Talia’s husband was too low to cover such expensive treatment. Whereas financial resources pooled together from the extended family might have paid for the initial treatment, its high costs would have probably made it difficult for the family to provide long-term financial help for this purpose. The socioeconomic imbalance between Talia and Ashraf gives Ashraf more power to decide how and by whom care should be provided.

In the cases of Fatima and Suheila, their families’ perceptions of their needs are related to their childrearing abilities. Whereas care is often described as a dyadic relationship between two people, often mother and child, very few societies conceive of childrearing as the sole responsibility of the biological mother (Tronto 1993). In Sudan, parents are often responsible not only for their own children, but also for children of their siblings and other extended family members. When these children become adults, they are in turn responsible for providing for their aunts and uncles in times of need. Therefore, childbearing and childrearing are concerns of the entire family (Schlytter and Linell 2010). In the cases of Fatima and Suheila, their male relatives were concerned about the decisions of these women and their capacity to provide for their children, especially because they were living alone and abroad. This is rather paradoxical because even though women are often viewed as ‘natural caregivers’, they are also pictured as ignorant and unable to be in charge of providing care (Fisher and Tronto 1990), causing other family members to intervene. In this regards, the different contexts, and the different ways in which social protection is organised in each context plays a crucial role. Whereas in Sudan it could be problematic for a single working woman to take care of her children alone, both in the Netherlands and the UK state-provided benefits and other sources of support—e.g. foundations or specialised schools for children with special needs—facilitate childrearing tasks of single parents. For Suheila, the schools in the Netherlands are seen as more valuable than family support, which could even be counterproductive. Similarly, Fatima prefers to allow her son to develop his career outside the university, rather than forcing him to do something he does not want. Whereas in Europe, going to university is not a requirement to succeed professionally, university education in Sudan is highly regarded, to the extent that multiple resources are mobilised to send children to university (Serra-Mingot and Mazzucato 2019). Becoming a doctor or an engineer is not only a source of pride for the family, but is also expected to translate in high income, through which children will sustain their parents and other aging relatives in the future.

Fatima’s status as a divorcee living abroad also contributes to her family’s perception of need. Divorced Sudanese women living abroad are expected either to marry again or to return to their family in Sudan, where they can be taken care of. Failure to do so may result in a source of disgrace for the family, with disastrous consequences for the social protection of its members (Nageeb 2004). But Fatima, who is living in the UK where she gets child benefits and is building a pension through her employment, does not plan to re-marry or return to Sudan. In other words, the social protection environment in which she lives allows her to cope with her needs without the support of the extended family. The perceived need of care remains closely linked to the sociocultural norms of the sending country, whereby the care-receivers’ needs and how to address them might differ from the caregivers’ perspectives. In Sudan, Fatima’s divorce would have probably pushed her to go back to her family, because without any state-provided support, raising a child and running a household on her own would have been complicated. Yet, the availability of a strong welfare state in Europe puts Fatima in a more powerful position to negotiate the extent to which she may allow her family decide upon her and her child’s wellbeing.

Circumventing burdensome care and avoiding conflict

As the cases illustrate, power relations often shape the definition of needs to suit dominant interests, whereby traditional practices of care within families sometimes result in the control of individual family members, based on gender and generational ideas of how care should happen. Yet, in these situations of imbalanced power relations and conflicting perceptions of needs and how to address them, care-receivers have an active role in circumventing care while avoiding conflict with their families.

One aspect of Talia’s strategy to avoid, or at least postpone, more medical interventions and avoid conflict with her brother involved over-extending her visits home as much as possible, so as to be far away from Khartoum’s hospitals. By being unavailable or cancelling appointments when feeling vulnerable to pressure from others, care-receivers protect themselves from receiving care while they purposefully avoid confronting their caregivers (Russell, Bunting, and Gregory 1997). The geographical distance Talia puts between herself and Khartoum helps her to gain control over her body, at least temporarily.

In Fatima’s case, her extended family’s efforts to provide unrequested care to her and her son are closely intertwined. To protect Haisam from the overwhelming good intentions of the extended family, Fatima makes up excuses to prevent her family from talking to him too often. In doing so, however, she takes up the burden of being constantly told to take better care of him, to discipline him more. Haisam’s perceived lack of discipline and educational achievements translates in additional pressure for Fatima either to re-marry or to come ‘back home’, for her own and Haisam’s good. Thus, to avoid conflict with her family and protect herself from the consequences of unsolicited care—namely, re-marrying and having more children—Fatima arranges a medical intervention that will prevent her from having more children. Whereas to prevent conflict with her family it may prove to be unavoidable to re-marry, Fatima’s geographical distance from her relatives allows her to take control over her body and her reproductive capacity. Living and working in the UK allowed her to undergo such an operation not only in a safe and inexpensive manner, but also without her relatives finding out.

In Suheila’s case, her brothers in the UK worried about her capacity to take care of her children in the Netherlands. By moving to the UK, her brothers reasoned, her disabled daughter Huda would have better educational opportunities, and she would also receive the care of her extended family. Yet, for Suheila this caring arrangement was not ideal, since family support would come with multiple commitments that would distract her from her main priority: taking care of Huda. Rather than accepting her brothers’ caring arrangement, Suheila drew a detailed and convincing plan—e.g. having her brothers talk to the school principal and inspect her living conditions in the Netherlands—to prove to them that staying in the Netherlands was actually a good decision.

Suheila’s strategic navigation of the physical distance between her and her extended family in the UK allows her not only to avoid the consequences of unsolicited care but also to receive care in a specific way. For Suheila, the hands-on practical and emotional care that her extended family would give her in the UK does not satisfy her needs. Yet, although she had the chance to move to the US, where the geographical distance would have limited much more her brothers’ intervention, Suheila appreciates her brothers’ concern and care, and therefore she refrains from moving to a place where family care would be quite difficult to receive. Instead, she opted for staying in the Netherlands, striking a balance between being far away enough to avoid constant social commitments and take more control over her own and her daughter’s life, and being close enough to receive care and support from her brothers whenever urgent needs arise.

Conclusions

This article explored an aspect commonly overlooked in the literatures of transnational families and caregiving: the role and experiences of female care-receivers in navigating the care provided by their male relatives abroad. Rather than being passive actors, the female care-receivers in this article exercise different levels of power and agency to protect themselves from the unwanted consequences of care, while avoiding family conflict, which remains to be the main source of social protection and reproduction in Sudanese. The geographical distance, the resources available in each context and the capacity to access them, shape the ways in which female care-receivers engage in negotiations and exercise their agency to shape the reception of care in different ways.

These cases showed that care is not a one-way relationship of someone doing something to someone else in a dyadic relationship, but a process based on interdependency, reciprocity and multidirectionality, involving multiple family members (Milligan and Wiles 2010). In taking the extended family as the main unit of analysis, this paper shows that care is expressed as an act of generalised reciprocity, in that, in caring for these women and their children, there is a degree of expectation that these children will be the future caregivers for aging family members. Often more than one caregiver is providing some kind of distant care for their female relatives and their children (e.g. orchestrating medical operations or checking up on their children’s wellbeing). At the same time, these women are also care-providers in two different ways: providing hands-on care towards their own children, and sustaining the family network by carefully circumventing unsolicited care and avoiding conflict.

This study contributes to the current debates of the role of care in TSP intrafamilial transnational caring arrangements in three ways. First, by bringing the literature of nursing and disability studies in conversation with the literature on transnational care and social protection, this article has shown that in transnational caregiving arrangements, care may be burdensome not only for the providers—as many studies have shown—, but also for the receivers. The multi-sited matched-sample methodology allowed for a better understanding of the two sides of the caring relation, and revealed how sometimes well-intended but unsolicited care becomes an additional burden for the care-recipient. Rather than being merely passive actors who accept the care provided by relatives abroad, what this article has shown is that female care-receivers do play an active role in protecting themselves against the consequences of unsolicited and burdensome care. ‘Protective care-receiving’ (Russell, Bunting and Gregory 1997) is a useful concept in the study of transnational caregiving arrangements because it allows us to investigate the care-receivers’ agency to accept or circumvent care to accommodate their actual needs, while avoid conflict with their families, who are the main source of social protection in Sudan.

Second, this study has shown that, in transnational caring arrangements, the power imbalances (inherent to all care relationships) are shaped by the geographical distance and the different institutionalised levels of formality and informality of the social protection systems in which care-receivers are based vis a vis their caregivers. The different cases showed that care relationships take place in interlaced frameworks of power and powerlessness (related to gender, generational and socioeconomic aspects), whereby agreeing on what ‘need’ means becomes more difficult in relationships with bigger differences in power (Milligan and Wiles 2010). In situations with limited face-to-face contact, the caregivers’ efforts to cover for the care-receivers’ perceived needs may not satisfy the ways in which care-receivers wish to have their actual needs covered. While this situation might lead care-givers to exercise more pressure on the care-receiver, it is precisely the distance between caregivers and care-receivers that offers more power to the latter to circumvent care and take control of their own needs and lives. At the same time, the (lack of) resources available in each context, gives the care-receivers more or less power to cover their own needs (e.g. lack of hospitals preventing more operations, reliance on the welfare-state to cover their own and their children’s wellbeing).

Finally, this article highlighted the importance to recognise the cultural context of the sending country and the role of extended families in caring and social protection arrangements. By bringing in the Sudanese context and the ways in which social protection and care relations are envisaged, this article has contributed to understand the complex family care relations and the gendered cultural norms in which care is embedded as part of social protection arrangements. Decisions on when, how and by whom care should be provided are based on factors including (perceived) needs, norms and values around gender and kinship bonds, (perceived) ability to cope, geographical distance and available sources of support (Milligan and Wiles 2010). In the cases presented here, women are perceived as being in need of family care and support in specific aspects of their lives, namely, the reproductive tasks of childbearing and childrearing. The ways in which their male caregivers care for them is based on the needs perceived from the Sudanese perspective, where women’s bodies and the children’s socialisation and wellbeing are crucial for the family sustenance. Therefore, rather than simply interpreting these dynamics as mere acts of patriarchal domination and control over women, analysing care from the perspective of social protection allows for a more complex interpretation of care as a multi-directional process to protect and sustain the family, which is the ultimate provider of social protection.

This study has two main implications for further studies on TSPtransnational care. First, more research is needed to better understand the role of care-receivers in care and social protection arrangements within transnational families. Whereas in this article I explored women’s perspectives as care-receivers, as a gendered process, men’s experiences as recipients of care should also be addressed. Similarly, while the women in this study had a middle-class and a high educational background, future research should investigate further the role of these factors in shaping care-receivers’ strategies to circumvent care. Second, it is important to recognise the cultural context of the sending country and the role of extended families. Understanding how care and social protection areis arranged in the Global South, where extended families play a crucial role in the sustenance of individuals, families and communities, is important for understanding the particular mechanisms through which migrants and their families navigate their individual and familial needs.

Notes on Contributors

Ester Serra Mingot is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Maastricht, where she conducted her PhD within the Globalisation, Transnationalism and Development Research Programme at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Her PhD was part of the Transnational Migration, Citizenship and the Circulation of Rights and Responsibilities (TRANSMIC) project, funded under the Marie Curie Actions—Initial Training Networks funding scheme. In her PhD Ester focused on how Sudanese migrants, in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and their families, in Sudan, provide support for each other, locally and across borders. Before starting her PhD, Ester obtained her BA degree in Translation and Interpreting (English/Spanish/Catalan, German and Arabic) at the University of Alicante (Spain). She holds a Master International Relations, Safety and Development (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) and a Master in Migration and Intercultural Relations (Universities of Oldenburg, Stavanger) and Ahfad University for Women). The focus of her thesis was on migration and gender in Sudan. Ester also has worked as a translator and tour guide in the Middle East.

Acknowledgements

This research was only possible thanks to my Sudanese respondents, who agreed to do my never-ending interviews, who opened me the door to their homes, to their families, to their whole lives, asking nothing in return. To all of you: Thank you! I would like to also thank my supervisors, Valentina Mazzucato (Maastricht University) and Virginie Baby-Collin (Aix-Marseille University) for their support and insights during this research, and in particular in the process of this article. Thank you also to the reviewers of the paper and to my colleagues at Maastricht University for their constructive critiques and tips to write a stronger paper. Finally, I would like to thank the European Commission for funding my research through the TRANSMIC project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded under FP7 Marie Curie Actions International Training Network ‘Transnational Migration, Citizenship and the Circulation of Rights and Responsibilities’ (project number PITN-GA-2013-608417).