Redoing Gender Relations in Transnational Lives

Studying Gender in Transnational Lives

There is nothing new in studying the effects of migration processes on gender, particularly in the case of women employed in domestic service (Adams and Dickey 2000; Parreñas 2001; De Regt 2010), but also in the way gender relations are restructured by the transnational experience (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Hoang and Yeoh 2011), ² which is the general subject matter for the present study. The question is from which perspective?

From the outset, gender studies and the transnational approach were two independent interdisciplinary fields and two ways of analyzing the contemporary social reality (Desai 2007). Seminal works on the transnational perspective such as Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanto (1992) had no connections at all with the gender issue (Pessar and Mahler 2003, 813). They were focused on global capitalisms and the complex experience of transnational migrants, and later developed concepts such as transnational “social fields” which eventually accommodated gender studies (Levitt and Schiller 2004, 1115) but always subordinated to global-political studies. I prefer to work from a viewpoint built upon mutual and critical reinforcement of both perspectives, like Pessar and Mahler’s (2003, 813) encouragement for “gendered analysis of transnational migration.” I agree that there is a direct connection between gender and social space and power (pp. 815–18) but not in defining gender by its opposition to sex (pp. 813–14) and patriarchy (pp. 820–22). I would rather follow the path taken by those who stress the relational, practical, situated, plural, and global nature of gender (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994; R. Connell 1998). With them we see the multidimensionality of gender, ranging from the personal, symbolic, or economic spheres to international relations, and leading us to a global perspective (R. Connell 2009a, 75–87), which is increasingly transnational, especially when the issue is gender relations in a migrant community that has different interactions, linkages, and recurrent flows with the country of origin while remaining inserted in the host country, that is, living simultaneously “here” and “there.” At the same time, all these movements situate me in the framework of “transnational studies” (Vertovec 2009), and more specifically, “transnationalism from below” (Smith and Guarnizo 1998), which focuses on the economic, political, social, cultural, and other relations that are shaped more informally than institutionally by migrants in a multiscale space (local, national, regional, and global).

Studying gender relations in transnational lives from this perspective may get us enmeshed in different debates about transnational marriages (Beck-Gersheim 2007; Charsley 2012), restructuring relationships and family spaces (McDowell 1999; Bryceson and Vuorela 2002), or “global care chains” (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Hochschild 2000). In fact, quite a few of them are reflected in the empirical research used to support the present study. In this article, however, I will focus on how male/female (domestic) gender relations are modified in transnational lives and how this process can help us in the conceptual debate that has been woven around the “doing gender” thesis. To that end, I first need to review this debate and the features of the underlying research.

A Conceptual Debate: From Doing to Redoing Gender

The whole argument in West and Zimmerman’s “Doing gender,” a milestone in gender studies, arose from an ethnomethodological perspective (Garfinkel, Heritage) that situates practical, recursive interaction at the core of social orders, structures, and realities (1987, 125–26, 146–47), and regards competent social actors as “practical methodologists” (p. 131) of what the occasion demands as gender-(in)appropriate, “that is accountable” (p. 135). A second basic premise was built on the differentiation between sex (fulfillment of biological criteria), sex category (display of features required to be seen as a member), and gender (activity in the light of normative concepts; pp. 131–35). Accordingly, the authors rejected “sex differences,” “sex/gender roles,” and “gender display” approaches to gender (p. 128), because it was neither a natural attribute nor a fixed social category and claimed that “a person’s gender is not simply an aspect of what one is, but more fundamentally, it is something that one does, and does recurrently, in interaction with others” (p. 140). Finally, in addition to accountability and having a practical or active nature, gender would have a third basic feature, namely, that it is “unavoidable” because of the pervasive and basic social consequences in all domains (domestic, economic, political, etc.) of its deployment: to do gender appropriately is to sustain, reproduce, and render legitimate the institutional order of men’s dominance (pp. 145–46). Set at the crossroad of feminism and gender studies, they had to acknowledge that social movements and legislation may produce a change in the institutional order of gender, but for them, as ethnomethodologists, the real thing happens within the “interactional scaffolding of social structure,” where doing gender confers “their sense of ‘naturalness’ and ‘rightness’” to mechanisms of social control and differentiation (p. 147).

The debate I want to contribute to grew up from the interpretation of this argument as denying the possibility of removing gender inequalities, as it is still a “gender maintenance” theory of “accountability” to the prevailing social norms that produce and legitimate gender inequalities (Deutsch 2007, 107–13), and thus become somewhat inflexible models or “essential natures” of men and women. This interpretation, which may be extended to the understanding of “doing gender” as a (willing) way of coping strategy (Jewkes 2005; Persson 2012) and to many of its different implementations, is “inadvertently” supported by the insistence on the unavoidability of doing gender and the denial of the multiple, internal links between interaction and structural change (Deutsch 2007, 107). In this context, the proposed need to set aside the idea that gender differences and inequalities are inevitably reproduced in “doing gender” came as no surprise. Deutsch (2007) and Risman (2009) proposed, in a feminist vein, a greater sensitivity to the ways in which gender interactions reduce these differences and inequalities, undo them, or do them with variations, that is, redo them: a sensitivity to proposals that foster greater equality, such as, for example, speaking of “undoing” (instead of doing) because of its performativity.

West and Zimmerman have been sensitive to this criticism. They are now willing to assume that the active construction of men’s hegemony makes it “subject of social change” (2009, 114) and to carefully consider the interdependence among historical or structural circumstances and reproduction of social structures in interaction (p. 119). They stand firm, however, on “accountability to sex category” as the key aspect of “doing gender” (pp. 114, 116), which drives them to an unfair criticism of the notion of “undoing gender,” as if it meant the end of gender inequality (pp. 117–78) and not the confirmation of a particular fact and (the expression of) a widespread feminist wish. Whatever the case, they do take a step forward when, immediately after acknowledging that changes in the historical and structural circumstances can facilitate shifts in gender interaction, they claim that “it is a shift in accountability: Gender is not undone so much as redone” (p. 118). However, this is not enough, because they withhold the separation between institutional and interactional levels, the idea that the internal dynamic of doing gender is a pure reproductive dynamic and a reduction of (redoing) gender to the interactional level.

In order to overcome these shortcomings and advance the redoing gender option, we return to the course of the debate, realizing that it runs parallel to some of the major milestones in the evolution of contemporary social theory, and then interpret it as a conceptual displacement toward a more complex perspective of gender.

The initial work, with its acknowledged ethnomethodological inspiration (West and Zimmerman 1987, 126), emerged as a micro, constructivist reaction to functionalist (sexual role) and Marxist (patriarchy) structural concepts of gender;

The debate has thus moved toward a more complex view of gender that detects in its constituent, performative practices the manifestation of a recursive doing but also a redoing that shifts, modifies, and even undoes important components of gender differentiation such as binarism, which can sometimes happen almost simultaneously, affect different aspects of this differentiation, or take place at different levels (interactional, institutional, global, etc.).

However, this theoretical displacement is not enough either. We need to reinforce it with empirical evidence of the complexity and continuity, not without contradictions, of doing, undoing, and redoing gender in interactions, as exemplified by the much vaunted case in this debate of “transpeople” (C. Connell 2010). For this reason, the present article presents an empirical case, paradigmatic I hope, where the complex, internal dynamics of gender relations become mainly a reproduction with variation, a re-doing (of) gender relationships and identities.

An Empirical Investigation: Methodological Remarks

Our three-year fieldwork in several parts of Spain, Ecuador, and Senegal focused on Ecuadorian emigration to Spain in its transnational dimension and its comparison with the case of Senegal where polygamy, the extended family, and Islamic culture provided a clarifying contrast. ³ Although we used statistics taken from sources such as the National Immigration Survey (Instituto Nacional de Estadística [INE] 2007) and local census, most of our data came from thirty-four in-depth interviews with 19- to 56-year-old men and women from different social classes and backgrounds (urban and rural) who represented the different and most significant stages and positions in a transnational life. ⁴ There were also four life stories, three discussion groups, eight interviews with experts, and repeated nonparticipant observations in the main towns, communities, and households involved in the study.

Secondary quantitative data help to map sociodemographically immigrant populations and select representative subjects, but when researching interactional dynamics such as domestic gender relations in transnational lives, qualitative research “has particular strengths” (Levitt and Schiller 2004, 1113; West and Zimmerman 1987, 141–45) in order to capture meanings, experiences and, gender models (interviews and life stories) as well as hegemonic discourses (discussion groups). Following these research techniques, the quotes were discussed and selected from a cross-analysis of all collected discourses on the base of their relevance to our hypothesis (see below) and their being most representative, semantic nodes, dominant metaphors or images, or significant contradictions, self-corrections, or cases.

Our initial hypothesis was that the various flows (material, personal, emotional, and symbolic) between local spaces in different countries produce material, emotional, and imaginary changes in households and in gender relations and positions, shifting them and making them more flexible and malleable.

Two historical processes should be taken into account when gauging the extent to which this hypothesis is corroborated in our study case and its usefulness for the re/doing gender debate. Firstly, many parts of late-twentieth-century Ecuador have made a transition from traditional gender orders that relate hierarchically contrasted identities, nearly disconnected and subjected to community cohesion, to a version of the hierarchical order of inequality that characterizes transitions into modern functional differentiation (Garcés Dávila 2006; Camacho 2001), with a similar albeit slower process in Senegal (Diop 2008). Secondly, the dynamics of migration to Spain, primarily from Ecuador, evolved from a male, rural profile between 1980 and 1998, to a mixed, urban interclass profile and much more numerous between 1998 and 2005 (Herrera, Carrillo, and Torres 2005, 5–8). Thus, while the first wave of migrants reinforced the contrasting hierarchy of the two sexes, the second has gradually seen more (re-)balanced and dynamic relationships.

In order to calibrate the changes produced in gender relations within the transnational experience and not to overstate them we have to be aware that there are cases of gender-driven migration projects, such as wives forced to follow their husbands, people with repressed sexualities, or young Senegalese men “pushed” into emigration by their mothers to improve their precarious status as second or third wives. Although, in most cases the project emerged from the family’s economic situation, in the broad, heterogeneous sense, which leads the most influential aspect causing the eventual changes in gender relations to generally be the processes, expectations, practices, material conditions, problems, and achievements that emerge during the transnational experience.

Finally, when we gauge whether what these changes ultimately produce is a reaffirmation (doing), a decomposition (undoing), or a restructuring with alterations (redoing) of the initial gender order, we must avoid oversimplifications. For example, when we highlight circumstances such as wives who have a paid job as well, the long and varied working hours, the emergencies that arise in the life of the emigrant, and so on, which favor a more balanced task distribution, we are assuming that the initial relationship was based on the unequal modern/industrial gender division of labor (males for production and females for reproduction), when in quite a few cases, migrants come from environments (agricultural or lower classes) in which the distribution was different and perhaps less imbalanced.

Straining Dynamics: Stretching and Shrinking

Distancing in time and space obviously stretches gender interactions and positions. For example, it relaxes external pressure (shame and honor) that prevented the breakup of a couple that was no longer happy, as mentioned in one of the discussion groups with Ecuadorian women. However, the most repeated aspect was that the stretching destabilizes the male/female relationships (usually asymmetrical), which easily leads to a breakup, either because they discover previously unknown strengths, as mentioned in Ecuadorian women discussion group, or because, despite the shared transnational experience, the patterns and obligations imposed by their respective jobs (she has to be an intern, he has to go to another town, etc.) or the different ways of experiencing changes that arise, cause an enormous emotional distancing and a loss of confidence that may destroy the relationship.

Other parallel dynamics, such as the same courtship rites found in discotheques in both countries, could be called shrinking or narrowing. Perhaps their most outstanding form is the supervision and control exercised over wives left back at home (Pribilsky 2007, 258, 271). In both countries, women tend to stay with one of the parents to resolve “needs” such as care for the elderly, resulting in the monitoring of the wife, ensuring that there is no divorce and that the monthly transfer continues and, in the case of Senegal, in the maintenance of the extended patriarchal family.

The question is what general trends and effects derive from these dynamics. The first trend, primarily discursive, is the stiffening of two traditional gender positions and the emergence of judgments and preferences based on this (re)established dualism. This tends to be more common among men, like the Senegalese (39, Madrid) who “saves himself” for the stable relationship in which he will be “the protector with the exclusive right to open the closed book that will be his wife” or the Ecuadorian who, according to his wife (37, Otavalo), tells her, “I’m not going to bring you over here, you’re going to hurt me straight away, because this environment [… I] want the wife to be kept at home and all that”. The second trend means that although gender relations are expected to still revolve around family reproduction and the maintenance of the gender order back at home, in fact they adapt to the changes required by the goals and conditions of the transnational experience, even when they contravene this order, as in the case of a more equal distribution of household chores.

The noted contrast between these trends helps to appreciate two broad, interrelated effects that place gender relations firstly, in a strained or contradictory situation by stiffening the models but making the practices more labile, as in the case of one transsexual (40, Murcia) whose need for affection has led her to seek acknowledgment by her mother and family which she has been maintaining with remittances, with the dream of finding someone to retire her from the street and leave her at home, “… to lead the life of a normal wife”; and secondly, in the unstable balances fostered by a complex, ambivalent situation which not only opens the old can of worms of patriarchal dualism (or “hegemonic masculinity”) while facilitating an empowering processes for women but also strains situations and weaknesses, increasing dependencies and imbalances, which require a reorganization of gender relations. In this sense, one female expert in social services for migrants in Murcia told us about women who remain in Ecuador and as recipients of remittances they become administrators and managers of family assets: on the one hand, they find it easy to accept these tasks and even become empowered entrepreneurs, while on the other, they idealize the work of their emigrant husbands and feel an obligation to them and their figure.

Unstable Balances

Shifts and realignments in these gender relations can be more clearly appreciated by addressing the complexity of these unstable balances ⁵ that are established primarily on the basis of obligations, conflicts, and asymmetries.

From the outset, the migration process involves the assumption of several obligations related to the couple (unequal sharing of child care and monitoring tasks, strategic or instrumental use of marriage to maintain the extended family, etc.). These obligations are further altered by the transnational living conditions, such as the lack of family help for child care, having to share the same house with other people, and so on:

Of course, here the man has to help […], I cooked one day, my husband the next, sometimes we would get up at 5 AM to cook, one day he got up, another day it was me, but not in Ecuador. The wife does everything in Ecuador. (Ecuadorian woman, 41, Campo de Cartagena)

The imbalances that most profoundly affect the core of these relationships are, however, those concerned with conflicts and (a)symmetries that inevitably arise in the couple’s own gender relations. The main sources of such conflicts easily induce changes in gender relations, as in the case of imbalances caused by adjustment to the new country. Senegalese Muslim women, for example, experience a contradiction between the difficulty of raising children here, without the help of the extended family, and the obligation not to use birth control, which leads to abstinence and a strained relationship with their partners. In other cases, family reunification is the cause of tension. For example, in a reunification after a long separation that has cooled relations, the woman finds that her partner has to work all day and is absent from a shared house where there is no privacy to rebuild the relationship and no support network, thus obliging her to change her attitude toward her partner. In parallel, as graphically explained in an Ecuadorian women’s discussion group (Madrid), in the case of a man who migrates to reunify with his family and fails to adapt to the new external (e.g., work) or internal requirements,

[… His] wife is no longer submissive, it’s no longer, Daddy, here’s your hot food, look, your nicely ironed clothes, because here, there’s not much time for that, so you have sort of more freedom, both her and him.

Although the redistribution of a couple’s tasks and abilities can produce positive effects, it is another basic source of such conflicts which, amplified by the distance between transnational couples, can profoundly alter their gender relations and positions, even their gender embodiments—changes in eating habits, dress, or attitudes. That is the case of an Ecuadorian man who, according to his daughter (22, Quito), instead of “thriftily” managing the remittances sent by his wife for her house and children, which would probably further question his masculinity, spent it on his own interest, and probably another woman.

Transnational living also produces destabilizations in the interplay of (a)symmetries, a decisive, dynamic ingredient of gender relations. The changes in these (a)symmetries produced by, for example, task redistribution, significantly alter most gender dimensions (power, resources, imaginaries, and identities). Therefore, either they generate, by constant renunciations and efforts, changes in dispositions and habits that rebalance the (a)symmetries and allow the relationship to be maintained or they destabilize them to a point that leads to an irreversible rift. However, this process is by no means linear, given that the dynamics of these (a)symmetries are highly complex and governed by a situational logic: they can change direction depending on the situation (e.g., if it is the woman or the man who has paid work), and they can be adopted temporarily until “things return to normal,” that is, they return to the initial (a)symmetry, although in fact this may never happen.

Another type of situation has attracted much attention in these complex sets of gender (a)symmetries: the “empowerment” of some women. As mentioned above, in some cases, women become breadwinners or control the couple or family’s entire economy, which gives them unprecedented power, a new decision-making ability and greater self-confidence, which alters if not reverses the previous asymmetry. In addition, many emigrants feel that Spanish law gives women new leverage, as exemplified by a Senegalese immigrant (40, Madrid) who said that in a serious conflict between a couple in Spain, “the first thing the police do when they come is to get the man out of the house,” while “there,” “it’s the woman who leaves the house.”

The problem resides in the tendency to identify this empowerment with the axis that encompasses almost all changes in gender relations caused by transnational living, which has led to a haphazard intermingling of events which, once differentiated, permit the scope of the empowerment to be nuanced and relativized as a gender recomposition process. Such events include, for example, some men who also experience a liberation from the control and restrictions in their country of origin; the segmentation of the labor market resulting in a kind of “positive discrimination” in favor of the recruitment of women (domestic service, child and elderly care, etc.); empowerment of women who receive remittances and as a result, have increased responsibilities and burdens; or the fact that, contrary to the stereotyped assumption that these same women were previously powerless or submissive, it is the women who normally take on the responsibility of the family’s subsistence both “here” and “there,” which gives them more power there than is usually assumed, while “here” their own life is restricted and destined to low-skilled jobs and long hours (Gil Araujo 2010, 88–89).

Shifts and Modifications

Moving to the consideration of the ways these contradictory situations and unstable balances alter the core of gender relationships, we must begin by remembering that the effects of transnational living on these relationships (e.g., lack of time for conviviality, greater freedom or less control, both partners working away from home, etc.) can gradually dilute the bond that feeds it, create a sense of distance and open the way to other relationships (“commitments”) which may not necessarily lead to a breakdown but will require the power-gender relations and the gender positions of each one to be recomposed. Another three general types of core shifts process can be added to this. Firstly, those that shake the underlying balance of dependence and independence in the couple’s bond (Pribilsky 2007, 255–59). This was expressed quite clearly by an Ecuadorian woman (37, Otavalo) left behind to care for her children, while her husband had already been in Spain for three years, when she mentioned her enhanced autonomy and skills (driving, working away from home, etc.) and, while mentioning that she missed him and wanted intimacy/sexuality, was nevertheless not willing to relinquish these achievements and was therefore, “concerned about what will happen when he comes back.” Secondly, there are displacements of different morals that intertwine and strain these relationships. This happens when a Senegalese returnee (31, Dakar) asks his wife to be, “Like a man, able to think […], work, […], do everything she wants, learn to drive, […] she has to be an open person, […] If I always tell women that they shouldn’t be like jewelry, jewelry is very pretty, but just for looking at.” Morals and customs acquired in Spain cross paths here with the more traditional standards that still seem to prevail in Senegal. Finally, we can find displacements that strain relations to the breaking point including, most significantly due to their repetition, the dynamics that lead some gender relations conceived as an obligation (in origin) to become pointless when their underlying external control (essentially by family and community) ceases to exist. Thus, from slow breakup of relationships in a long separation to couples of more than ten years that unsuccessfully reunify, the breakup is usually attributed, “to the great freedom we have here,” “the man packs up and leaves, or the woman packs up and leaves, seeing she has money, she packs up, and after that come the problems” (Ecuadorian woman, 41, Murcia).

Transnational dynamics also produce shifts in the periphery of gender relations, as in the case of changes to the general living conditions “here,” exemplified by a young Senegalese (39, Madrid) whose need to sell on the street led him to act against his principles after less than a month, forced to greet unknown women by shaking their hands or even kissing them, which changed the way he interacted with them, or the labor market segmentation that has driven women to take charge of the migratory project, reversing the previous asymmetry that prevailed in their relationships. A second area is represented by shifts in gender positions or models. This is the case of males who arrive as adults with families and well-established habits, only to find that they have to relinquish their status as breadwinners to their wives and accept the role of caregivers or are expected to accept a more egalitarian, respectful attitude. If they cling onto their original masculinity, they are likely to feel unsuccessful and make the relationship unbearable and untenable, while a change of attitude will not only alter their identity but their gender relations as well.

Now, in order to detail and specify the impact of all these shifts on the (re/un/)doing of gender, we need to look beyond this provisional typology at the broad aspects that modulate their effects and, more extensively, at each of the constituent features of their deployment (i.e., uneven intersections, duality, and situated character).

Three broad modulating attributes can be clearly identified here. First and foremost, the complexity of the dynamics that foster these shifts, primarily because they combine, in an uneven and spatially differentiated way (here/there), symbolic (meaning, morality, values, etc.), and material aspects (remittances, resources, etc.), but also because they are simultaneously deployed in multiple gender scales (Pessar and Mahler 2003, 822) and they are subject to the application of different forces of attraction or repulsion (lack of time here, obligations there, etc.). This gives rise to tensions that are mitigated by resources such as taking consecutive steps in opposite directions, for example, on return, maintaining a less-controlled relationship while at the same time going back to a less egalitarian task distribution. The second modal feature is that most of these shifts are dominated by a degree of ambivalence, as in the case of Senegalese women who receive remittances (from their husbands or offspring) and have to decide how to manage this money in the context of the extended family, pressed on all sides by requests and demands: they gain social status and power, are released from some control by the in-laws, brothers, and husbands, but on the other hand, have to cope with a huge increase in burdens and responsibilities, which means that “they have to make sacrifices in their own budget [… and] lose out financially” (expert, Dakar). Finally, although—or perhaps because—these shifts involve moving between different worlds and having to overcome many difficulties, there is a mismatch between the rigid models and ideals that are said to be maintained and the real changes that occur in everyday gender practices and interactions: there is a mismatch between discourses and practices.

Uneven Intersections

The first constituent feature of these shifts in gender relations is its practical intersection with other social inequalities, albeit with three clarifications. Firstly, here I am not implementing the so-called intersectional perspective, but simply stating a historical fact that may be better perceived because of a special sensibility for intersections. Like Wiegman (2012, 31), I regard the analytical practice of intersectionality more as a practical aspiration than a methodological or theoretical perspective. Secondly, we must not interpret this intersections as an extension of the “doing gender” theory to other social differentiations, as proposed by West and Fensermaker (1995), because on the one hand, we cannot return to a micro, constructivist approach that camouflages the social system of interlocking oppressions—its “social locations,” in Pessar and Mahler’s (2003, 821–23) terms—that constructs these differences or favors gender when explaining social inequalities (Hill Collins 1995; Jones 2009) and also, being committed to a transnational perspective, we have to be sensitive to the variability, historicity, and multiplicity of the systems of differentiation/oppression (Purkayastha 2012). Finally, it is difficult to discriminate which inequalities are tied up in a particular social differentiation and the weight of each one. For example, the “global care chain” (Hochschild 2000), in which domestic workers send home remittances for someone to take charge of their children (“transnational motherhood”), can lead to an alteration of the gender division of labor (if the father takes on this role), a reaffirmation of age and gender obligations (if it is the eldest daughter or the grandmother), or a shift in class (if a babysitter is employed).

Class inequalities are easily perceived to be entangled in these gender shifts. Consider the fact that males, whose gender position or identity is linked to his job and salary, particularly in the middle classes, feel their gender questioned most intensely by the descent in class that is often brought on by migration, at least initially; or in the way that in the most impoverished areas, gender relations can ultimately be subordinated to those of class, as in the case of the Senegalese woman who always feels ashamed of showing that she likes you, but “If she sees money, she is more tender than anyone else; she’ll say, ‘You’re so cute, Daddy,’ she treats you as if you were a God, she’s nice to you, sings to you, you know?” (Successfully returned male, 37, Dakar.)

Race or ethnocultural inequalities are possibly where the multiple intersectionality of these shifts is most obvious, because they immediately appear to be intertwined with class and gender determinations when in these shifts the move from a small traditional farming community, where marriage is by family arrangement, to a big modern city outweighs one’s clearly differentiated ethnic origin, although in fact, in Ecuador, these small communities tend to be indigenous and lower class. Not to mention the way an Islamic, polygamous, and extended family culture, as in much of Senegal, encourages the instrumentalization of finding a partner and restricts women’s sexuality.

Whatever the case, the differences introduced by the age, or the point in the life cycle, become surprisingly important when they influence the assimilation and maintenance of shifts in gender relations, unlike, for example, the greater weight that class seems to have in the academic achievement of emigrant’s children. This is the case, for example, with the “empowerment” of some women that is only possible when they become adults and marry, but also with the ease of young men, unlike their elders, to accept these changes, so that in many cases, after engaging in relations with different women, perhaps from different countries, they interact and embark on a stable relationship in a more egalitarian way (Ecuadorian male, 30, Madrid).

Ultimately, intersections with other social orderings make it more difficult for gender practices to be changed at will (undoing) or to be purely recursive (naturalizing doing), while at the same time, increase their variability by opening them to different avenues of change (differently doing: redoing).

Two Social Logics: Duality

Perhaps the clearest constitutive feature of these shifts is that they are usually associated with the dynamic confrontation between two different social logics that correspond to different social orders with their respective regulatory or legitimating frameworks, forms of coercion/stimulus and “cocoon” or personal safety measures, so essential for personal identity (Giddens 1991). The most extreme case is the embodied clash of two logics: honor-shame-respect versus success-individuation-freedom; communitarianism that tends to essentialize two opposing, complementary yet almost disconnected gender positions, versus individualism centered on success and tending toward more open or liberal gender models and relations. Generally, however, what we find is the strain of experiencing two different and at least partially conflicting social logics, a duality, which energizes many of the ambivalences and contradictions that foster these shifts in gender relations. ⁶ This is the case of a young returnee, the son of emigrants (24, Cañar) whose discourse expressed the strain between appealing to the woman’s obligation (traditional, “there”) to care for her husband and at the same time that the woman (“here”) must work outside the home and accept a different “scene.” He thus noted two conflicting regulatory frameworks and attempted to resolve this strain by maintaining two lifestyles, liberality in one place, and fear of what people will say, under close social control, in the other:

In my case I don’t take my wife out that much, I go out for a drink with my friends and I don’t take my wife with me, if it’s a family party I do, but going out with your friends, you don’t take her. In Spain it’s different, you go out with your friends and she goes with me […].

Finally, this strained coexistence of two logics or regulatory frameworks leads us to say that the accountability to gender appropriateness to sex or to a membership category that West and Zimmerman (1987, 135; 2009, 116) see as a key aspect of “doing gender,” cannot be internally linked to a purely recursive and interactive way of naturalizing or entrenching (i.e., doing) the models of femininity and masculinity, as what can be detected in the shifts that we have been following is a malleability and an adjustability, not without difficulties, of the models and frameworks to which practices and gender relations are accountable. It is, therefore, more accurate to understand this accountability, following Hollander (2013, 9–11, 24–26), as an interactive system of orientation, assessment and enforcement, expressed in interactions, embedded in social structures and open to “re-creating gender in a new form” (i.e., open to redo gender). ⁷

Situated Character

The fact that the changes in gender relations caused by transnational living may be altered or not survive the strain of the contrast of these logics or their intersection with other social differentiations leads to the suspicion that they are unstable or have a basically situated character, also suggested by the hypothesis that the characteristic habitus of transnational lives consists of a set of dualistic provisions that adapt automatically to the situation (Guarnizo 1997, 311). The problem is to gauge the significance of this situated character.

On the one hand, like the fact that the duality of adapting to the two frames or situations of reference (source and destination) does not lead the shifts to have two faces, but rather to respond, not without strain or contradictions, to demands and conditions that may well be contradictory, their situated character does not make them more mimetic than assumed, nor more adopted than embodied. Instead, it places them in a constant process and adjustment. On the other hand, this character should not be regarded merely as evidence of the social nature of these shifts—like Vertovec (2009, 37–38) seems to do when identifying it with “embeddedness”-, but rather that it shows its adaptability, its capacity (exerted almost automatically) to actively adjust to the local conditions, and in this way maintain a fluid existence, which is not synonymous with transience or superficiality.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that gender relations are power relations, and hence always subject to some kind of conflict, which in this case means that, when the shift brings with it greater equality or autonomy for women, most of them struggle to prevent the potential realignment from erasing these advances, while some males try to recover certain privileges on their return. One Senegalese returnee (31, Dakar) who lived in France and Spain is an example of the latter case. Before leaving Dakar, he had never done any housework and on emigrating was astonished to see his brother cleaning, cooking, and so on, but eventually accepted the situation and undertook these duties himself, although on his return he stopped and now only cooks a typical European dish on special occasions. An example of the former case is a returnee couple whose male partner stopped doing household chores after receiving negative comments from other men, including his own students, while his wife (35, Quito) clearly complains about the situation, continues to blame her husband directly, and does not hesitate to confront him and his friends when they want to turn the house into a drinking and party venue, contrary to the customs acquired in Spain. In both cases, as in other similar ones (Alcalde 2011), women’s behavior and peer pressure emerge as basic factors in shifts and continuities in men’s gender behavior, although we should not disregard the additional influence of state agencies (Pessar and Mahler 2003, 819–20). The main conclusion here is that the adaptability of these shifts on account of their situated nature becomes caught up in the power struggles that are inevitably embedded in gender relations, making them even more susceptible to a constant redoing.

Conclusion and Discussion

Gender relations in Ecuadorian and Senegalese immigrants in Spain are subjected, by the conditions, networks, and flows that shape their transnational lives, to stretching (e.g., distancing from family ties, support, and obligations) and shrinking (e.g., increased control over some of those who have stayed behind) dynamics. In practice, this leads these gender relations to shift away, more or less radically, from their original order, while their discourses sometimes maintain a reference to traditional rigid gender positions. The strain and instability fed by all these processes into the (a)symmetric balances that organized these gender relations prevent their linear or mechanical reproduction in their normal, everyday constitution (gender that is “done”) and foster their reconfiguration (redoing of gender). In particular, the dynamics, conflicts, and (a)symmetries that take place within gender relations, and the remote/immediate management of affections and obligations that are brought in, are subject to a range of factors (e.g., the loneliness of the emigrant, the lack of community control, the lack of belonging that can be caused by reunification, etc.) which shift them away from their initial balance and subject them to complex, unstable processes of recomposition.

I have described different types and sources of such shifts in gender relations, but their effects are always complex and ambivalent. On the one hand, they can provide both emancipation (as in some women’s empowerment) and domination (as in increased obligations for the same women) at the same time, while on the other, as far as they question a gender difference or asymmetry, they generate conflicts that are pushed out of sight temporarily (e.g., subordinated to the main purpose of the journey) or manifested openly with demands for a renegotiation of the relations or even lead to a breakup that involves a reappraisal (not necessarily liberating) of gender identities. This complexity of the changes in gender relations can be explained by the fact that the potential for interactions to do, undo, or redo gender is given not only by their dynamics or “procedures,” as argued by ethnomethodological approaches, but also by social orders (not only of gender), conditions and historical processes, and their embodiment in subjectivities and specific strategies.

In conclusion, in this kind of transnational lives at least, gender interactions do constitute, albeit not exclusively, gender differences and inequalities. However, far from being limited to sustaining or doing what is required by adherence or accountability to a sex/gender category or focusing on the struggle to undo inherited models and standards, they usually cope with the shifts they are subjected to, (re)doing their own formats with variations. Moreover, the constituent features of these shifts confirm that in most cases, the corresponding interactions are simultaneously a recursive reproduction and an alteration of gender relations. Hence, their intersection with other social inequalities (age, class, and ethnicity), which can vary from one time-space to another, their constitution in the dynamic encounter between two different and partially conflicting social logics, their changeable accountability, their adaptability to the surrounding conditions, that is, their situated character, and their nature as power relations that are permanently open to conflict and contestation. It can thus be said that our research concurs with the direction recently taken by the theses of the “doing gender” debate. Nevertheless, this opens up several discussion topics, two of which I wish to mention.

Firstly, the issue of the extent to which we accept the thesis that “doing gender is unavoidable” (West and Zimmerman 1987, 137). We can accept this as the statement that our interactions produce (do) gender differences and hence can modify or even minimize them but scarcely undo them: “gender is not undone so much as redone” (West and Zimmerman 2009, 117). However, this requires, on the one hand, the removal of the essentialist aftertaste that may be embedded in this interpretation when it is conjugated with denying that male hegemony can disappear or with the referral of the inevitability of gender differences to biological reproduction, as in the case of West and Zimmerman (2009, 117–18). On the other hand, it is important to remember that what we have seen, in congruence with other studies (Messerschimidt 2009; C. Connell 2010; Hollander 2013), is that there is actually a constant shift or remodeling of gender relations (positions and identities), rather than their disappearance or linear reproduction, and that the inevitability of gender only occurs in this sense. However, whether this is a contingent fact and whether its disappearance can be dreamed of, or whether it is a necessary fact that derives, for example, from gender relations being essentially power relations, are debatable issues.

Secondly, in the sense argued by West and Zimmerman (2009, 117–18) that what seems to undo gender is actually “a shift in accountability,” since neither binarism nor asymmetry could be erased entirely, we can now state that what seems to be mechanical reproduction, doing gender, is actually redoing with variations, as the interactions that would “do gender” are constantly shifted in the wake of social structuring, historic conditions, adopted strategies, established (im)possibles, and so on. What is proven is thus the predominance of a recursive (re)doing of gender, which nevertheless shifts and varies it.