(Re)negotiating transnational identities: Notions of 'home' and 'distanced intimacies'. (May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Belford, Nish; Lahiri-Roy, Reshmi
• Is Part Of: Emotion, space and society. Volume 31(2019)
• Page Start: 63
• Page End: 70
• Publication Date: 2019-05
• Subjects: Emotional reflexivity -- Home -- Intimacies -- Transnational migration; Emotions -- Periodicals; Spatial behavior -- Periodicals; Space perception -- Periodicals; 152.4
• DOI: 10.1016/j.emospa.2018.11.004
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1755-4586

Abstract

Abstract: Transnational migrants negotiate the multiplicity of 'here' and 'there' and contested notions of 'home' between home and host countries. As transnational migrant women in Australia, we explore these notions and our intimacies with 'home' as a complicated, ambivalent set of imaginings, biographies and emotions in relation to place, people and socio-cultural expectations. Using evocative autoethnographic accounts through 'intimate landscapes of self-confessions' based on personal experiences our narratives articulate 'intimacies' as something other than a direct relationship between self and other. Intimacies become a space within which self and home can be sought and experienced through emotional reflexivity (Holmes, 2010) generated by memories, practices of relationality and place-making through sociocultural encrustations. Skrbiš's (2008) emphasis on migrant narratives rooted in emotions, Bradatan, Popan and Melton's (2010) concept of fluid social identities and Ahmed's (2000) challenge to the notion of home as a 'fixity' underpin our discussion on identities and positionalities. Reflecting on a 'notional home, ' we touch upon our 'practise of emotions and intimacies' (MacLaren 2014, Everts and Wagner, 2012) in relation to home and host cultures, with reference to gender, race and class in renegotiating our transnational identities. Highlights: Exploring notions of 'home' and 'intimacies' with 'home'. Evocative autoethnographic accounts of 'intimate landscapes of self-confessions' based on personal experiences. The relational with others and self - explored through emotional reflexivity. Transnational women re-negotiating 'identities' as wrought by gender and sociocultural encrustations.