Grandmothers, girlfriends and big men : the gendered geographies of Jamaican transnational communication

This chapter explores transnational relationships with particular attention to the gendered dynamics of the communication and connection in the context of extensive transnational migration (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2003; Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton-Blanc 1994). As feminist scholars have argued, the construction of gender relations and ideologies fundamentally structures communication and within the context of transnationalism, gender emerges as a consistent and important variable in two ways. In the ï¬rst instance, nation-states often decide who can migrate and why, based on categorical and structurally-shaped deï¬nitions of gender, what Mahler and Pessar (2001) describe as the "gendered geographies of power", a concept that accounts for the spatial and social scales, social location and the types and degrees of agency expressed and exercised in transnational spaces (Pessar and Mahler 2003). Historically Jamaican men have been recruited to the United States for farm work on sugar cane plantations in the south and fruit farming in the Northeast. Women, by contrast, were admitted for professional occupations such as nursing and, in the more recent past, teaching and service sector jobs in the tourism industry. While laws signed for family reuniï¬cation and the acquisition of professional and advanced degrees by a segment of women in Jamaica have shaped such dynamics, these structural trends continue to influence how individuals and their families cope with the importance of migration in Jamaican life.