‘She’s a real expat’: be(com)ing a woman expatriate in Luxembourg through everyday performances of heteronormativity

Abstract

This paper provides an ethnographical account of everyday practices of how expatriate women in the Global North adjust and negotiate their gender position to become part of a transnational elite. Drawing on feminist scholarship, it makes the case for a comprehensive understanding of the production of expatriate wives’ gendered subjectivities in relation to the neoliberal doxa of success associated with transnational mobility. Through an intersectional analysis that places the body as the main scale of analysis, this paper sheds light on the role of hegemonic sexual norms in the context of family migration in Luxembourg. The results reveal the spatial dimension of heteronormativity in the shaping of expatriate subjectivities. They also give insights into how these women access the world of global privileges while supporting the social reproduction of their expatriate family and contributing to the reconfiguration and reproduction of exclusionary power relations. In so doing, this paper argues for the use of heteronormativity as a useful – although underused – analytical framework to understand further the power dynamics that shape transnational experiences, spaces and subjectivities in the context of neoliberal globalisation.

Keywords:

• Expatriate
• gender
• heteronormativity
• privilege
• trailing spouse
• transnational elite

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the women who generously shared with me the intimate narratives of their everyday lives. A respectful thank you goes to the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and insightful comments. Thanks also to Jennifer Bartmess for her final editing of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karine Duplan

Karine Duplan is a feminist geographer. Committed to the promotion of social and spatial justice, her work aims to understand the processes of boundary-making in everyday politics. Her research interests centre on the geographies of gender and sexualities, critical mobilities and migration studies, and ethics and reflexivity in the social sciences.