Gendered Geographies of Power: Analyzing Gender Across Transnational Spaces

This volume reflects many scholars efforts to interrogate the role of gender in the processes of creation transformation and also fortification of transnational social spaces--spaces that are anchored in but extend beyond the borders of any one nation-state. To date gender has rarely been a principal focus of studies on transnational spaces and processes including transnational migration and this volume strives to nurture a corrective discourse. The authors hold that bringing a gendered optic to transnational studies benefits both the study of transnational processes and the study of gender. The authors in this volume identify a series of transnational spaces and the processes and ideologies operative within them. The authors examine how and why gender relations are negotiated in transnational contexts and also how gender organizes them. To do so the authors identify where men and women girls and boys are located within these spaces and why. The authors explore the question of gendered agency on a variety of operative geographic and analytic scales that begin with the body and extend across continents. While two of the authors main objectives are describing how gender operates in these transnational contexts and why they also seek to evaluate its effects. Are gender relations and ideologies reaffirmed reconfigured or both across transnational spaces? What measure is meaningful and culturally appropriate to use and at what level or levels should the analysis be applied--individuals organizations states and so on? Finally the editors of this volume have culled ideas from each paper as well as those articulated by additional scholars during a series of conferences and workshops leading up to this volume in an effort to synthesize them and develop a conceptual framework for studying gender in transnational contexts. The authors outline this framework entitled "gendered geographies of power" later on in the volumes introduction. The task the authors set out to accomplish has been daunting and the journey the authors have traveled long bumpy and incomplete but the authors hope to hearten others to take up the call and truly incorporate gender into the study of transnationalism in all its dimensions. (authors)