Negotiating daughterhood and strangerhood: Retrospective accounts of serial migration

Abstract

Most considerations of daughtering and mothering take for granted that the subjectivities of mothers and daughters are negotiated in contexts of physical proximity throughout daughters’ childhoods. Yet many mothers and daughters spend periods separated from each other, sometimes across national borders. Globally, an increasing number of children experience life in transnational families. This paper examines the retrospective narratives of four women selected from a larger corpus who were serial migrants as children (whose parents migrated before they did). It focuses on their accounts of the reunion with their mothers and how these fit with the ways in which they construct their mother–daughter relationships. We take a psychosocial approach by using a psychoanalytically informed reading of these narratives to acknowledge the complexities of the attachments produced in the context of migration and to attend to the multi-layered psychodynamics of the resulting relationships. The paper argues that serial migration positioned many of the daughters in a conflictual emotional landscape from which they had to negotiate ‘strangerhood’ in the context of sadness at leaving people to whom they were attached in order to join their mothers (or parents). As a result, many were resistant to being positioned as daughters, doing daughtering and being mothered in their new homes.

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