Abstract
This article presents the results of a case study that aims to highlight the processes by which French female migrants in London and Manchester attempt to de/re/construct identities to negotiate the challenges of the cultural and social structures in England. This research centres on 15 semi-structured interviews with French women residents of diverse backgrounds. The interviews conducted represent counter-narratives to existing studies which focus only on highly skilled French migrants in London and define them as free movers and ‘invisible migrants’. This study attempts to fill a gap by examining solely French women migrants in Manchester and London as a strategic research site for a number of key research questions taken from the current literature of intra-European migration, gender and identity. Indeed, the ways in which migrants negotiate their identity are crucial to migration studies and have to be analysed in relation to women’s specific experience. The study exemplifies how migrants’ identities are a ground of negotiation, contestation, deconstruction and reconstruction. Patterns that emerged in this study first highlight the high heterogeneity among women’s strategies of self-identification and definition and sense of belonging in a changing Europe. The article concludes by proposing a refined notion of transculturality as a useful concept for future explorations of changes in contemporary European societies and the role women can have in them.
Why research French female migrants in England? French migration, intra-European studies and gender
Research on gender and migration has changed considerably since the 1980s. However, in spite of major advances, migration studies today can still be gender blind or male biased. Some scholars have analysed migration as a gendered phenomenon using the gender indicator to argue that immigrant women share common immigration experiences, which differ from those of immigrant men (Cook, 2006; Grewal and Kaplan, 1994). The study of gendered immigration has led to transnational feminism, which has emerged as part of the transnational perspective of immigration research. This approach pays attention to the intersection of national boundaries, class, race, gender and sexuality. The transnational feminist agenda theorizes a global communication network that facilitates transnational dialogue among women in the world. 1 However, there have been far fewer studies focusing on contemporary female global migrants from Northern metropolises, who constitute an important facet of cultural globalization (Boyle, 2000; Hebard, 1996; Yeoh et al., 2000). This could be explained by the fact that these migrants are regarded as non-racialized and therefore as non-problematic. In the literature on migration, they are often ‘unsituated’ and erased from discussions. It is important, therefore, to look more closely at how gender operates to structure the ways in which this category of migrant women is positioned outside both dominant narratives of migrant men and those of traditional non-European ‘ethnic’ female migrants (Hardill, 1998; Kofman, 2000; Pratt and Yeoh, 2003).
The study seeks to fill this gap by giving voice to these unheard stories in order to understand French women’s experience of migration and identity negotiations. The research in Manchester has been complemented by exploratory comparative work in London, the favourite ‘global city’ example in Europe (Taylor, 2000) with its very high resident population of foreign EU citizens, especially French. In this article, I take a sceptical look at just how possible it is to state that there are no real barriers to integration for French migrants and argue that they cannot be described as ‘invisible migrants’. I seek to show first how French female migrants in my sample define their identity and the different modes of negotiating being French in England, focusing on the diversity and heterogeneity of the self-definition within my sample. I then take into account the impact of location/environment where the migrants live in the sense of belonging. These two points lead to the impact of individual identity on the host country, through the concept of transculturality.
Despite numerous studies on intra-European migration, the French migratory flow to the UK and its gendered components are still to be explored and need to be taken into account in order to understand the exchanges and dialogues between countries and cultures and their possible impact on one another. More generally, investigations into the gendered components of intra-European migration still represent an under-researched area and when gender is addressed most studies explore traditional push and pull factors. As pointed out by a growing number of European scholars, instead of simply understanding migration as a series of such push and pull factors in relation to economic forces, migrants’ identities are being recognized as important factors in shaping mobility (Boyle, 2002: 531; Kofman and England, 1997).
The few studies that have addressed the gendered component of intra-European migration include the 2006 PIONEUR research project (Recchi and Favell, 2009). This involved completing a comparative survey of 5000 citizens in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Italy but tackled gender differences superficially, only in relation to factors for migration and changes in social status that it involved. Likewise, studies conducted in the UK focus on the economic impact of new EU and non-EU immigration on the labour market, as well as issues of integration, assimilation or ethnic enclaves. Two important European research networks, CReAM and Norface, based in the UK, exemplify this trend; they have conducted numerous quantitative studies to analyse the impact of immigration in Europe while qualitative studies tend to focus especially on new EU countries such as Poland, Romania or Bulgaria (see e.g. Ryan et al., 2008, 2009). Thus, these various networks have carried out detailed research into intra-EU migration from the new accession countries while French migratory flow has not been explored.
This could be explained by the lack of official data on the number of French migrants in England. Statistics on emigration and immigration are provided by Eurostat, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and MFE (Ministère des Affaires étrangères and Maison des Français a l’étranger) but their data do not always coincide (Legoux and Orain, 2014). While the Worker Registration Scheme monitors the numbers of migrants from new accession countries entering the UK and the EU Sponsored Urban Audit records data on foreign populations in the largest cities in Western Europe, no single mechanism exists for the systematic registration of migrants from the old EU nations. The majority of European residents in Britain never even consider registering with their consulates, therefore it is difficult to accurately assess the number of French migrants in England. Figures vary but it has been suggested that the number of French migrants in London could be as high as 300,000 (Mail Online, 24 January 2010), and based on the French Consulate’s estimates, 400,000 (The Economist, 24 February 2011). Because of the concentration of French migrants in London, especially in the wealthy area of South Kensington, studies have tended to focus on this population. For instance, an 18-month qualitative study conducted by Mulholland and Ryan (2011, 2014) between 2010 and 2012 took a traditional research stance by exploring the life and work experiences of highly skilled French migrants in London’s financial and business sectors, and their families.
The specificities of the migratory flow between France and UK have been discussed only by Favell (2008) within a more general study of European migration in major European capitals. Favell used quantitative methods to investigate a sample of individuals who embody spatial and social mobility in Europe and their transformative effects on a possible new European society. According to Favell, French citizens are an example of Eurocitizens for whom political constraints to relocation in another country of the union are virtually non-existent and barriers to integration in the host society are therefore minimal (Favell, 2013: 56). He describes the French migrants as ‘free movers’ in London, and as an example of EU movers who can be regarded as invisible migrants, for whom ‘integration’ as it is largely conceived is irrelevant (Favell, 2013: 56), in contrast with traditional non-European ‘ethnic’ immigrants and East–West movers or post-enlargement (2004 onwards), who can be categorized as ‘exotic others’ (Favell, 2008: 171–172; Silverstein, 2005: 364). Admittedly, French migrants to the UK are not racialized by political discourses and cannot be regarded as immigrants in a political or legal sense. However the limits of this categorization and definition as ‘invisible migrants’ are explored in this article by looking at the complexity of individual experiences and identity definitions, as the focus is not the governmental barriers which might result in ‘integration’ problems, but on identity destabilization and negotiation that result from the migratory experience, despite geographical proximity.
One of the major failures of the studies mentioned above is not to address the specific experience of female migrants and also the fact that they tend not to differentiate between mobility or temporary migration and settlement. Though there is a large gap between stated intention and outcome, the article focuses on long-term migration and not short-term mobility that is so common for young French migrants. In this article, I address this gap in the literature and take a sceptical look at just how possible it is to state there are no real barriers to integration for French migrants and examine the experience of female residents and settlers rather than temporary migrants.
Unlike previous studies, the subject of my analysis is not London and the highly skilled free mover. The French migrants in this study are currently living in the UK and the sample encompassed both pre- and post-EU accession migrants. These women’s motivations for migration include personal reasons (escaping a personal crisis, joining a husband who had to move to the UK) as well as career reasons and job prospects. Their migration is linked to personal choices so they should be the ones who face the fewest barriers linked to exclusion or domination or economic exploitation.
The concept of integration is not applied in this article though it is used by UK and European policies, as it relates to an assimilationist discourse present today and is an example of methodological nationalism (Anthias, 2013: 329; Wimmer and Glick Schiller, 2002). 2 As noted by Anthias, it assumes integration into a given social fabric (Anthias, 2013: 328) and on subordinated terms (Anthias, 2001, 2013: 330; Mulinari and Neergaard, 2005). Besides, integration is also based on a view of identity as ready-made and fixed and does not recognize that people engage in identity work, constantly challenging and negotiating their identities (Ahmed, 2007; Anthias, 2013: 335). This is the view taken in this article, which is based on a view of identity as multidimensional and plural and this complexity needs to be acknowledged in order to avoid the tendency of various intra-European migration studies to create rigid categories such as ‘free movers’, ‘new-Europeans’ or ‘non-Europeans’. Though useful and necessary, such rigid categories erase meaningful differences and do not reflect the reality and the variety of intra-European migratory experiences. They also fail to explore the intersectionality of gender, class, race and sexuality within the European context (Anthias, 2013; Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 1983, 1992; Brah, 1996) and ‘the possibility for members of ethnic groups to take on multiple identities and affiliations or cultural hybridity’ (Werbner, 2013: 401). Therefore, in order to avoid the ‘trap’ of methodological nationalism, when conducting the interviews, ‘Frenchness’ or French identity were not defined.
The questions asked were about feelings of belonging, to avoid categorizations that do not measure the complexities of social and cultural identities. The complexity of belonging is reflected in these interviews as one needs to differentiate between belonging and the politics of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006, 2011). Belonging is about emotional attachment, about feeling ‘at home’ (Yuval-Davis, 2011: 4), it is usually multi-layered, multi-scale (Antonisch, 2010) or multi-territorial (Hannerz, 2002; Yuval-Davis, 2011: 5). 3 Cultures also are never uniform so it is vital to avoid creating static, homogenized categories or ‘cultural’ groups, as all members would not necessarily identify with the same definition (Anthias, 2013). Likewise, in this article, identity is examined by looking at how a person feels they belong to the community of the country of origin and/or residence and the interface between one’s subjective positions and social and cultural situations that give a person a sense of personal location, which may be locally situated, extend nationally or transnationally and should not be contained within the borders of individual nation-states (Glick Schiller, 2003, 2005). Such an ethnic lens reinforces methodological nationalism and obscures the diversity of migrants’ relationships to their place of settlement and to other localities around the world (Brubaker, 2004).
This study seeks to demonstrate that when locality is considered, the national narratives of immigrants’ self-definition and sense of belonging can be questioned and disrupted, by taking the example of two specific cities, Manchester and London. Much of the research and theory of locality has been based in cities categorized as either global or gateway cities. However, less well-positioned cities, such as Manchester, can be particularly important locales in which to obtain insights to move migration research beyond the hegemony of a single model of migrant sense of belonging and self-definition (Glick Schiller et al., 2006: 613).
Migrating to other countries and to different cultures in the globalized world exposes people to multiple ‘others’ and this may contribute to individuals being able to compare and contrast their identity with those of others. This mix or hybrid of cultures and identities developed by migrants brings us to the concept of transculturality, which has attracted growing interest in the field of migration in recent years, especially in Canada and the USA (Lenz, 2012). Transculturality defines a wide range of identities and broadens the concepts of interculturality or multiculturality; in the literature, it is most often used in the following meanings: ‘cross-cultural competence, identitary continuum and plural sense of self’ (Benessaieh, 2010: 21). This concept makes it possible to look at identity as plural and multiple and cultures as not static and fixed but as permeable. Afef Benessaieh has worked extensively on transculturality and explains that it captures some of the living traits of cultural change as highly diverse contemporary societies become globalized (Benessaieh, 2008, 2010). The concept considers the blurry lines between cultures as relational webs in active interaction with one another and is a useful tool for examining the ‘situation of individuals, communities, societies that increasingly draw from expanded, pluralized cultural repertories, in their everyday life practice and imaginary’ (Benessaieh, 2010: 11). Transculturality is not synonymous with interculturality, as interculturality suggests that cultures can be dualized and polarized as essentially different, whereas transculturality actually designates other complex processes and situations that view cultures as mobile flows in close interaction with one another. 4 In this article, I seek to explore the concept of transculturality and to raise the following question: to what extent can this concept be transposed to migrants in Europe by taking the example of French female migrants in two multicultural and cosmopolitan cities, London and Manchester?
Methodology
In the following, I draw on a study undertaken during the summer of 2013 based on 15 semi-structured interviews, conducted in London (where the number of French nationals has caused some to declare it the fourth largest French city) and Manchester, the biggest city in the north-west of England, which has been since the early 2000s a principal destination for European migrants.
The semi-structured interviewing approach used questions divided under four main themes: migration experience and belonging; identity negotiation; exploration of transculturality; and community and networking. I asked five questions for each theme. The study used snowballing and network-based sampling techniques to find this population, varying interviews by age, marital and professional status. I conducted 11 interviews in Manchester and four in London. All the interviewees can be described as français de souche (French citizens born of French origin families), 5 and with the exception of two interviewees who are from rural areas, the rest of the sample is from an urban background: two-thirds are from Paris, while the remaining third is from other large cities in the south and north of France. Within the sample two groups are identified that reflect the changes over time in intra-EU mobility rights with the key moment of the 1993 Maastricht Treaty, which established the formal legal conditions for unrestricted mobility of EU citizens. Half of the sample of interviewees migrated before 1993 and as such had a different experience of migration, since French migrants in England were less common than post-Maastricht. These interviewees are educated; they work or are working part-time, and tend to be self-employed. The interviewees who migrated in the 1990s and 2000s used their free movement opportunities to move in order to study and work in England, facilitated by the treaty and encouraged by various European student exchange programmes, such as Erasmus. Reasons for migrating and the economic position differ between the two groups. In the first group, all interviewees but one migrated for personal reasons to join their husbands, whereas the latter group’s migration is linked to improved job opportunities; these interviewees are therefore skilled or highly skilled and in my sample, with the exception of two, they all work in academia. Indeed, following the OECD and European Commission/Eurostat definition, the second group would be regarded as highly skilled and the first group as non-highly skilled, but all are middle-class. 6 Most of the interviewees are married, heterosexual and have children, there is one divorcee and two are single. Interviews were conducted in French and then transcribed and translated into English.
After asking a question about migration motivations, followed by one on experience of migration and difficulties met, I asked the interviewees an open question related to identity definition (i.e. how they defined themselves). The interviewees all agreed that there are particular elements that constitute ‘Frenchness’, yet did not put forward explicit singular national identifications. Although not subscribing to an identity label as English, the interviewees consider themselves part of English society in the sense of having taken a decision to live in England and feeling generally satisfied about it. They mentioned working and paying taxes as indicators of their commitment to this society. Significantly, two-thirds of the sample chose the term migrant to define themselves, rather than expatriate (chosen by only two), and three of them defined themselves as Europeans. 7 They explained that for them ‘a migrant is someone who has left their country and settled in another one’ or that ‘a migrant is someone who moves to another country to work’. Such self-definition already questions Favell’s claim that intra-European movers do not see and define themselves as ‘immigrants’ at all (Favell, 2013). My sample of interviewees feel that they have absorbed English culture, using terms such as ‘immersion’, ‘adaptation’ and ‘absorption’, but difficulties with feelings of belonging emerged in many interviews. Even though most stated and asserted that they are French, no matter how long they have been living in England, many differentiate between ‘to be French’ and ‘to live in England’. My interviewees feel that they are French living in England, stating that their visibility is always marked by their accent or external differences such as style of dress that mark the impossibility of blending and ‘hiding’ their identity, still having even after years, ‘French ways of reacting to a situation’. The analysis I am drawing on is deeper and wider than what I can present in the confines of this article. For reasons of space and for the purpose of this article, I focus on interviews with five French women and present some of my findings looking specifically at the patterns that correspond to different modes of negotiating being French in England, of belonging and of the self-definition within the sample. This pattern is clear in all 15 interviews, but I use illustrations from the five which offer the most prominent examples. I then consider the impact of the location on cultural identities, which will lead to an exploration of the concept of transculturality and implications for future research.
Results
To ‘be French’ and ‘to live in England’: Identity definition and belonging
First, the struggles around identity definition are made explicit by Amélie, a highly educated single woman who has lived in Manchester for 20 years; she introduces the concept of hybridity to define her identity which she understands as the feeling of being ‘in’ two cultures, having two cultures in parallel that she can refer to, which is regarded as positive and as a skill:
I see myself as a cultural hybrid between two cultures.
What do you mean by ‘cultural hybrid’? Can you explain?
The fact that I live in England, I work using English and I spend most of my life in England but I listen to French radio all the time, French television, I eat at French times, I spend lots of time in France, I don’t feel detached/separated from my original culture.
Do you feel you belong here?
Yes because I live in England, my house is here, I live here but I am French. That is my hybridity … but I say ‘home’ to talk about France, and I would say home when in France thinking about England, I say ‘I am going home’ when I go back to France.
Does that mean you feel in between two cultures?
No, I am not in between, I have two cultures in parallel and I switch from one to the other.
Amélie feels she can switch cultural codes and language and expresses how the concept of home is ambivalent. As Ulf Hannerz (2002) claims, home is essentially a contrastive concept, linked to some notion of what it means to be away from home. It can involve a sense of rootedness in a socio-geographic site or be constructed as an intensely imagined affiliation with a distant locale where self-realization can occur (Yuval-Davis, 2011: 5). Home is England but also France, it is ‘here’ and ‘there’ and refers to a different country depending on the location. The self-definition as a hybrid relates to the intersection of various factors. Indeed, Amélie is still in contact with her country of origin because of her level of education, work and marital status, which gives her the freedom to identify with both France and England and to switch cultural coding and languages. This example demonstrates how migrants can reproduce dominant national narratives by assuming that one’s primary identity is national and thus reflecting ‘methodological nationalism’. It also illustrates how transnational migrants can have changing perceptions of space and territory, as well as notions of belonging which are impacted by the local environment and different levels of geographical orientation become relevant depending upon context (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). For transnational migrants, belonging is complex and cannot be reduced to identities and identifications, though it tends to become ‘naturalized’ and thus invisible in hegemonic formations (Yuval-Davis et al., 2005: 526).
Location, location, location and the complexity of belonging
In this sense, belonging, as Crowley (1999) argues, is a ‘thicker’ concept than that of citizenship or integration to a culture. As exemplified by the next interviewee, one has to take into account ‘the dimension of how subjects feel about their location in the social world, which is generated partly through experiences of exclusion rather than about inclusion’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2005: 526).
8
The following example shows the impact of the location, the city where you live, in self-definition and in feelings of belonging. Claire, an educated woman who has lived in Manchester for 15 years, married to a British man, with two children, lives in a very multicultural area in Manchester where everybody seems to her to be a foreigner, which means that she feels that she can blend more easily within a multicultural city:
We live in an area in Manchester where there are many foreigners so I am in my element, I mean I am not surrounded by British people only, but by people who are like me because they come from a different country. Having said that, if I was living in the little town where my parents-in-law live, and we go and visit them regularly, I would feel more French there. And I … I have the feeling that I am not in my country there (thinks) because they see me as French. … Because there are not many foreigners in this small town. … They probably don’t know many French people, apart from me … so it’s a different world. … For me, there is Manchester and the rest of England where … it’s a different environment. … I don’t feel immersed in a British culture in the sense that there are so many cultures where we live. … Yes I am exotic for English people but they do not reject me either, so it’s ok (laughing).
In the multicultural area in Manchester where she lives, Claire feels that she can blend in more easily, whereas one might expect this would be the case in London but not necessarily in the north of England with its ‘segregated structure’ (Yuval-Davis et al., 2005: 524). 9 This example demonstrates how feelings of belonging are also related to people’s perception of the individual in question. Claire makes a distinction between Manchester as a multicultural city and the little rural village with not many foreigners where her in-laws live, where she feels that she is perceived and labelled as a member of a different racialized group and this has effects on how she sees herself in terms of belonging and otherness (Yuval-Davis et al., 2005: 526). There, her nationality is made visible and she is made more aware of it and regarded as ‘exotic’. Such perception by ‘others’ of Claire as exotic and thus as racialized casts a different light on claims made by Favell and other sociologists of the EU that French citizens in the UK are ‘invisible’ migrants and that within the context of EU mobility rights, national borders are ‘treated as if they have little or no significance for EU citizens other than as markers delineating locations on a map where languages tend to change’ (Kennedy, 2008: 120). Likewise, most interviewees stated that there was a gap between the way they perceive themselves and how others perceive them or ‘label’ them at home and in the host country, in both cases as strangers. This very gap creates the need to redefine and negotiate cultural identities.
Moreover, as illustrated by Claire, some French women in my study have a localized vision of England, stating that ‘England is Manchester for me’, ‘England is Hulme [area in Manchester] to me’ or ‘London city centre’. Migration researchers report that newcomers tend to develop a local based identity and depending on the context, locality could refer to a neighbourhood, a city, or a region (Anthias, 2002). 10
In this sense, the role of the regional, local or city environment on identity definition, negotiation and feelings of belonging is crucial. Other interviewees pointed to the fact that in London and Manchester, there is a feeling that everybody is denationalized as everybody is foreign. For instance, Marie, a single educated mobile woman in her early thirties who has lived in Mexico, Spain and Switzerland and has been living in London for two years, explains that London’s cosmopolitanism is not seen as being representative of British culture or identity:
11
I feel that London is not actually representative of Great Britain. Because there are so many foreigners so it’s really a cosmopolitan culture … when living in London are we really living in a British culture, I am not sure … I really feel there is a difference between I am British and I am Londonian … I feel that anybody can be Londonian!
The examples of both Claire and Marie question a ‘view of culture as mechanically tied to belonging, and treating difference and belonging as mutually exclusive … you may identify with a country but not feel that you “belong” in the sense of being accepted or a full member’, and vice versa (Anthias, 2013: 325). As demonstrated by Anthias, this is not to imply that these are mutually exclusive categories but merely indicates that placing people into categories does not reflect the reality and complexity of the transnational migratory experience and heterogeneity in the self-definition and sense of belonging.
Having three cultures at home and transculturality
The final example illustrates the heterogeneity within the sample and another level of complexity, when there is no clear-cut identification or self-definition. This can be made more visible when three or more cultural identities/traits are involved (country of origin, country of residence and another or others), in which case the lines become more blurred and can even disintegrate. This is exemplified by Nathalie, a Parisian, in her late forties, married to a Syrian, with three children, who has lived in Manchester for 25 years:
I feel French, I have roots. … Actually I feel more Parisian as I come from Paris and I love this city. I lived in Paris so for me it’s more about Paris than being French, it was the city and here I live in the countryside. Do I feel that I am a migrant? I feel French, I still have roots. But it is difficult because I am married to a Syrian man. I don’t know how to explain, I feel French, here I am French, when I go to France, I am English because everybody calls me ‘l’anglaise’, whereas I am not English, but it’s because I live in England. Now I have lived longer in England than in France. And I don’t feel French … I am French but not really …
Nathalie expresses the difficulties in defining her identity, trying to fit into a category but failing to do so, repeating the phrase ‘I have roots’ and asserting a city based identity, ‘I feel more Parisian’. The slow diminishing of Frenchness is significant while a self-definition emerges as a ‘neither-nor’ process. Nathalie adds that she feels she belongs nowhere and everywhere at the same time:
Yes I would say that since my husband is Syrian, we have three cultures, we mix, we take a bit of each culture and that’s why I think we lose our roots … it’s a good thing and a bad thing because you don’t really belong anywhere anymore. I feel more Parisian, not really French … I don’t feel English, I am not English and I certainly don’t feel Syrian, when I go there, it’s a foreign country to me. So I belong in the end … I am … an English friend of mine told me ‘people of the world’, I can’t remember what she said ‘citizen of the world’, yes I belong nowhere … and everywhere at the same time … yes it’s a mix, good and bad at the same time.
This self-definition can be related to cosmopolitanism as ‘condition’ and is thus also related to transnationalism as a new social reality ‘where people can choose either to develop an open, or cosmopolitan, attitude, or a closed, or local, attitude’ (Olofsson and Öhman, 2007: 879). Indeed, the cosmopolitan is often described as a citizen of the world and he or she feels an integral part of the world (Pichler, 2009: 705).
12
But this process supports more specifically a definition of transculturality, as the transition from one culture to another. It does not simply consist of acquiring other cultural traits specific to another culture, which is what acculturation means, but the process she is describing involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation, and such a process results in an offspring that always has something of both parents, but is always different from each of them (Benessaieh, 2010: 126; Ortiz, 1995: 102–103). This interviewee is not the only person in my sample with ‘three cultures at home’ who shows the ability to adapt to different contexts and location – ‘becoming’ more French when in France and adapting to English values and culture by ‘becoming’ more English when in England – which is what transculturality is, as it can also designate ‘a chameleonic disposition for strategically rearranging one’s sense of cultural identity by drawing from an expanded repertoire according to the moment, context or location’ (Benessaieh, 2008: 28). This need and capacity to rearrange one’s cultural identity and draw from a cultural identity repertoire is expressed by Jeanne, a highly educated married woman, who has lived in Manchester for 19 years, in relation to the education of her two children:
You take bits from here bits from there to be able to live, to be able to understand the world around you as you come from somewhere else … to carry on, to transmit it to your children, who will themselves need this bricolage, it is somehow a third sphere, a third sphere that we have built with French people in England, those I work with and who are in the same situation.
Jeanne considers this bricolage as necessary to transmit cultural values from a broader repertoire to her children. Likewise, in my sample, many of the interviewees show a desire to play a part in the local community in their role as mothers and educators, trying to transmit transcultural knowledge (Erel, 2009; McLaren and Dyck, 2004). The role and impact of these female migrants on the creation and transmission of transcultural capital needs to be acknowledged, in order to understand their contributions to social and cultural life in the receiving society. As pointed out by Erel, ‘migrant women co-produce the locality they live in, this changes their own and their children’s imagined future relationship with transnational belonging and vice versa’ (Erel, 2011: 706).
13
By contrast with interculturality and hybridity, which view cultures as homogeneous and retain the term culture at their heart (Anthias, 2013: 337; Young, 1996), transculturality can also enable us to avoid creating hierarchies between cultures or cultural identities, and avoid analysing cultural networking as a clash of differences with stubborn hierarchies, by acknowledging that cultures are ‘hybridized’, and undergoing continuous transition (Welsch, 1999). This is exemplified by Claire, who uses the metaphor of food to refer to this permeation and layers of transcultural knowledge:
In spite of all this mixture/mix, I don’t think I have lost the essence. I have added layers, yes you add on your ‘magret de canard’, because it’s important to me, tortillas, English breakfasts, but you still have ‘le bon saucissson’ and that stays. You just add up …
Through this example, we can understand how transculturality may be a useful term for those individuals who, by virtue of a mixed background or lived experience, participate in a plurality of cultural flows and worlds, and need a precise term to express their multifaceted identity (Benessaieh, 2008). In the case of French migrants, as an example of intra-European migrants, it can be useful tool to explore further hyphenated identities of migrants, especially in the case of mobile individuals or those who have ‘three cultures at home’ as a possible future of Europe.
Conclusion
This study offers a new perspective to our understanding of female migrants and identity negotiation through the example of French female migrants. In this article, I have questioned the notion that French migrants can be regarded as ‘invisible migrants’ and have argued against the use of the term ‘integration’. The article began by critiquing the focus on integration as such a focus is based on an assumption that all members of a specific ‘cultural’ group are equally committed to that culture; such a notion constructs homogeneous communities whereas cultural groups cannot be treated as given and unchanging (Anthias, 2013: 325; Brubaker, 2004, calls this ‘groupism’). I have explored the complexity of identities and of self-definition in order to demonstrate that clear-cut categories do not fit the reality of female migrants’ experiences. Besides, the ways migrants are affected by their differential positioning and various external factors have been acknowledged by taking into account the impact of the location/environment where the migrants live in the sense of belonging.
Though the small sample size of this study limits its generalizability, the study was designed as a pilot for initial examination of these important questions and the suggestive nature of the findings has implications for future research. Free intra-EU migration constitutes a legal and political reality but the sociological reality is much more complex, as exemplified by the present study. Its particular strength is its focus on women as it seeks to reassert the agency of these unheard migrants’ agencies in order to mediate between them and political forces in the future. More qualitative data sources are needed to assess the experience, variations, different dimensions and heterogeneity of female migration. It is vital indeed to recognize the complexity and the heterogeneity of identities and to engage with more studies that would take into account differential intersectional identities and possible positive multiple identities (Yuval-Davis et al., 2005: 522).
EU policies tend to focus on the economic impact of migrants, and we need to acknowledge the role of female migrants, especially in their roles as mothers and educators in raising culturally, socially and economically well-integrated citizens and in transmitting transcultural capital.
Transculturality points to the need to better understand cultural diversity under globalization, as it will expand and evolve as more people become mobile and migrate to other countries, being exposed to otherness and difference via various channels, bringing with them and inventing their ‘home’, a home which is not necessarily defined or rooted in a territory, but in a set of values and cultural elements that are transportable and transmissible to future generations (Benessaieh, 2008: 28–29). In this sense, the new generation of intra-European migrants needs to be further explored, taking into consideration the migration of European citizens with a bi-cultural background in a third country and gender dynamics. This study shows the dynamic character of the complexity in identity definition even among ‘non-problematic’ EU migrants and makes it possible to speculate about transposing models of transculturality to the EU scenario. In a European context marked by increasing Europhobia and nationalism both in France and in the UK and following the May 2014 European elections, one might wonder how wide the gap is between EU political regulation of migration and available quantitative data sources that assess the numerical significance of migrants and their economic impacts, on one hand, and the cultural and sociological reality of intra-European migrants, on the other hand, an issue which is neglected in European political debates. Transculturality can be seen in this context as a possible site of resistance that would better reflect and embrace the complex reality of migrants’ lives and practices in a changing Europe.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research received a Research Accelerator Grant for the Faculty of Humanities, MMU ( delete no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.