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Gendered Geographies of
Power: Analyzing Gender
Across Transnational
Spaces
Sarah J. Mahler & Patricia R. Pessar
Published online: 04 May 2010.
To cite this article: Sarah J. Mahler & Patricia R. Pessar (2001) Gendered
Geographies of Power: Analyzing Gender Across Transnational Spaces,
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 7:4, 441-459, DOI:
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Gendered Geographies of Power:
Analyzing Gender Across Transnational
Spaces
Sarah J. Mahler and Patricia R. Pessar
This volume reflects many scholars' efforts to interrogate the role

of gender in the processes of creation, transformation, and also forti-
fication 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. We 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. We examine
how and why gender relations are negotiated in transnational contexts
and also how gender organizes them. To do so we identify where
men and women, girls and boys are located within these spaces and
why. We 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 our main objectives
are describing how gender operates in these transnational contexts
and why, we 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—
Identities, Vol. 7(4), pp. 441-459 © 2001 OPA (Overseas Publishers Association) N.V.
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441
442 Sarah J. Mahler and Patricia R. Pessar
individuals, organizations, states, and so on? Finally, the editors of
this volume have culled ideas from each paper as well as those articu-
lated 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 trans-
national contexts. We outline this framework, entitled "gendered
geographies of power," later on in the volume's introduction. The

task we set out to accomplish has been daunting and the journey we
have traveled long, bumpy, and incomplete, but we hope to hearten
others to take up the call and truly incorporate gender into the study
of transnationalism in all of its dimensions.
CONCEPTUAL GROUNDING: GENDER AND TRANSNATIONAL

MIGRATION
An essential element for developing a theoretical framework for

this task is to identify and clarify the points of departure for this
analysis and the definitions we employ for the key concepts of gender
and transnational. We begin with gender and draw upon the impressive
advances in its conceptualization through the work of many scholars,
not all of whom can be properly acknowledged, owing to space. The
authors in this volume premise their understanding of gender,
though not always explicitly stated, on the notion that it is a human
invention that organizes our behavior and thought, not as a set of
static structures or roles but as an ongoing process that is experi-
enced through an array of social institutions from the family to the
state (e.g., Hondagneu-Sotelo 1999; Lorber 1994; Ortner 1996). People
do "gender work," using practices and discourses to negotiate rela-
tionships, notions of "masculinity" and "femininity," and conflicting
interests. Conceptualizing gender as a process yields a praxis-oriented
perspective wherein gender identities, relations and ideologies are
fluid, not fixed. And recognizing that gender also becomes embed-
ded in institutions, lays the foundation as well for analyzing the
structural factors that condition gender relations in addition to ideo-
logical factors. People are socialized to view gendered distinctions—
as for example in the definition of male and female tasks—as natural,
inevitable, and immutable (see Ferrée, Lorber and Hess 1999; Glenn
1999; Kandiyoti 1988; Lorber 1994; Scott 1988). Conceptualizing gender
as a process, as one of several ways humans create and perpetuate
social differences, helps to deconstruct the myth of gender as a product
of nature while underscoring its power dimension. "[M]ajor areas of
Gendered Geographies of Power 443
life—including sexuality, family, education, economy, and the state—
are organized according to gender principles and shot through with
conflicting interests and hierarchies of power and privilege" (Glenn
1999:5). Gender is not the sole axis around which power and privilege
revolve; differentiation based on race, ethnicity, class, nationality
and other identities also plays roles, often in conjunction with gender.
Indeed, in this volume several authors articulate gender with other

dimensions of identity such as race (Brennan, Fouron and Glick
Schiller), class (Fouron and Glick Schiller, Mahler), ethnicity (Pessar)
and nationality (Goldring, Pessar, Fouron and Glick Schiller).
As with gender, our use of the term "transnational" must be defined
as well as its application to different spatial qualifiers, such as "social
field" and "context." "Transnational" and "transnationalism" have
been used and abused in such a wide variety of ways that some have
bemoaned the likelihood that it will become an "empty conceptual
vessel" (Guarnizo and Smith 1998). We cannot engage in a full dis-
cussion of the critiques of the multitude of terms employed in ways
synonymous with or comparative to transnational, but we acknow-
ledge and draw on them (inter alia Glick Schiller 1999; Guarnizo and
Smith 1998; Kearney 1995; Mahler 1998; Ong 1999; Smith 1994) in the
course of explicating our own understanding of them. A critical first
step is distinguishing "transnational" from "global," and the work of
Michael Kearney is helpful in this regard. He argues that "whereas
global processes are largely decentered from specific national territ-
ories and take place in a global space, transnational processes are
anchored in and transcend one or more nation-states" (1995: 548,
emphasis added). But Kearney's distinctions do not fully clarify
issues of scope and agency in the processes identified. For these we
turn to Glick Schiller, who asserts that
"Global" is best reserved for processes that are not located in a single state
but happen throughout the entire globe. Processes such as the develop-
ment of capitalism are best understood as global because capitalism is a
system of production that was developed not in a single state or between
states but by various emerging European bourgeois classes utilizing
resources, accumulated wealth, and labor throughout the world. On the
other hand, I employ the word transnational to discuss political,
economic, social and cultural processes that extend beyond the borders of
a particular state, include actors that are not states, but are shaped by the
policies and institutional practices of states (1999: 96, emphasis added).
In Glick Schiller's definition we find both spatial and power dimen-
sions of transnational processes clarified. That is, in transnational as
opposed to global and sometimes international processes, nation-states
and borders between them remain important; also, some participants
in transnational processes must not represent states' interests, a distinc-
tion first argued by Daniel Mato (1997).
However, there is still a need to anchor or ground transnational
processes in particular places and histories, as alluded to by Kearney
above. While we acknowledge that in some examples of transna-

tional agency, such as political organizing via the Internet, socio-
economic, temporal, and particularly spatial forces can play diminished
roles, in the articles in this volume, the transnational is not transcend-
ent of these forces. Rather, we find, along with Guarnizo and Smith,
that "transnational practices, while connecting collectivities located
in more than one national territory, are embodied in specific social
relations established between specific people, situated in unequivocal
localities, at historically determined times" (1998:11). The transnational
actions described in this volume's papers are clearly grounded. We
cannot understand how people communicate across borders, for
example, until we see how they are situated vis-à-vis access to commun-
ications skills and technologies.
A fundamental aspect of how the volume's studies are grounded
is their relationship to migrations. The papers trace the particular
reasons behind several migrations, including civil repression (Pessar,
Fouron and Glick Schiller, Mahler), sexual fantasies (Brennan), and
economic improvement (Goldring and Brennan), and the social ties
that people develop and sustain to their localities of origin and interest—
ties that are translocal as well as transnational. Some authors have
characterized the linkages immigrants build as "social fields" wherein
people "take actions, make decisions, feel concerns, and develop iden-
tities within social networks that connect them to two or more soci-
eties simultaneously" (Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton, 1992:2).
In transnational social fields, these ties are so thick that they are
"an inherent part of the habitual lives of those involved" (Guarnizo
1998:52). This description is applicable to three studies in this volume
(Fouron and Glick Schiller, Goldring, Mahler); for the others the ties
are more episodic and often imagined rather than always realized.
Given these variations in the intensity and actualization of ties, some
authors employ a more open descriptor to characterize these transna-
tional relationships across space, viz., transnational "spaces" or "con-
texts." We view transnational spaces/contexts as broader and more
inclusive than transnational social fields. For each, however, the use
of "transnational" remains consistent with that elucidated above.
A final dimension to our utilization of "transnational" involves
tracing levels and degrees of social agency. We recognize that important
work has been done examining the role of gender in transnational
social movements (e.g., Biysk 1993; Keck and Sikkink 1998). However,
the literature to date that takes a transnational perspective on gender
and migration has tended to focus on family and household levels of
agency (Alicea 1997; Bernai 1997; Goldring 1996; Grasmuck and

Pessar 1991; Guarnizo 1997; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Kyle
1995; Lessinger 1992; Mahler 1999; Ong 1992; Pe-Pua, Mitchell, Iredale
and Castles 1996; Wiltshire 1992). While we celebrate this work, we
also wish to push this analysis into higher levels of agency wherein
at least some of the agents are still everyday people. For example, in
transterritorial nation-state building. We see this as one contribution
of this volume.
BUILDING OUR CONCEPTUAL MODEL: GENDERED GEOGRAPHIES

OF POWER IN TRANSNATIONAL SPACES
To help us better study gender across transnational space, we, the

editors, have developed a conceptual model we call "gendered geo-
graphies of power." A delineation of this model is best achieved by
discussing individually its constituent building blocks. First, we select
the spatial term "geographies" to capture our understanding that
gender operates simultaneously on multiple spatial and social scales
(e.g., the body, the family, the state) across transnational terrains. It
is both within the context of particular scales as well as between and
among them that gender ideologies and relations are reaffirmed, recon-
figured, or both. This piece of our model we refer to as "geographic
scales." A good example of how gender operates simultaneously on
different geographic scales is found in the paper by Fouron and Glick
Schiller. What they argue is that when Haitian migrant women strive
to renegotiate their status transnationally, they often buy into and
thus reinforce the status system operative in Haiti. This gendered
status system is intimately linked to national identity even as it
subordinates women. Thus, we find that transnational actions, though
often associated with the erosion of the nation-state, can indeed for-
tify it and in so doing also reaffirm asymmetrical gender relations.
The analytical construct of "social location" is another component
of our model. By social location, we refer to persons' positions within
power hierarchies created through historical, political, economic,
446 Sarah ]. Mahler and Patricia R. Pessar
geographic, kinship-based, and other socially stratifying factors. We
underscore "gender" in the framework's title as gender organizes
human actions such as migration yet is frequently ignored. For the
most part, people are born into a social location that confers on them
certain advantages and disadvantages. For example, in Mahler's
paper she identifies how migrants from a very remote region of El
Salvador must struggle harder than migrants from urban areas to

build and sustain transnational ties. Similarly, a typical child born in
the U.S. enjoys a birthright quite distinct from a baby born in the
Dominican Republic. But hierarchies are not built just at the national
or supra-national level. Rather, hierarchies of class, race, sexuality,
ethnicity, nationality and, of course, gender operate at various levels
that affect an individual or group's social location. In other words,
multiple dimensions of identity also shape, discipline, and position
people and the ways they think and act. In sum, our model takes as
its foundation the obvious but not always stated fact that people—
irrespective of their own efforts—are situated within power hier-
archies that they have not constructed.
The third step in building our conceptual framework is to examine
the types and degrees of agency people exert given their social loca-
tions—hence our focus on gendered geographies of power. For this
we turn to the helpful concept of "power geometry" as elaborated by
Doreen Massey (1994:149). Massey notes that the particular condi-
tions of modernity that have produced time-space compression,
have also placed people in very distinct locations regarding access to
and power over flows and interconnections between places—similar
to our observations above. But she then goes further to foreground
agency as people exerting power over these forces and processes as
well as being affected by them. Some individuals "initiate flows and
movement, others don't; some are more on the receiving-end of it
than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it... [There are]
groups who are really in a sense in charge of time-space compres-
sion, who can really use it and turn it to advantage, whose power
and influence it very definitely increases [such as media moguls and
the business elite]... but there are also groups who are also doing a
lot of physical moving, but who are not 'in charge' of the process in
the same way at all. The refugees from El Salvador or Guatemala [for
instance]..." (Massey 1994: 149). There are also those who do not
move at all yet feel the effects of time-space compression, and there
are others who both contribute to this condition and are imprisoned
by it—such as the Dominican sex workers in Brennan's essay who
contribute to a German and indeed international sexual aesthetic yet
almost never get to see Germany for themselves.
Massey helps us to see not only how people's social locations affect
their access to resources and mobility across transnational spaces but
also their agency as initiators, refiners, and transformers of these
conditions. To her "power geometry" and our "social location" and
"geographic scales" we add two final dimensions to complete our

particular notion of "gendered geographies of power." First, we
view agency as affected not only by extra-personal factors but also by
quintessentially individual characteristics such as initiative. Thus,
two people may hail from equally disadvantageous social locations,
but one—owing to her own resourcefulness—will exert more influence
than the other. And second, we argue that the social agency we are
interested in must include the role of cognitive processes, such as the
imagination, as well as substantive agency. Much of what people
actually do transnationally is foregrounded by imaging, planning,
and strategizing; these must be valued and factored into people's
agency. However, there are cases where people may not take any
transnational actions that can be objectively measured (such as remit-
ting funds, writing letters, or joining transnational organizations),
yet live their lives in a transnational cognitive space. A concrete
example would be youth who envision themselves as becoming
migrants to such a degree that they stop attending school, seeing
very little utility in education if they become workers overseas.
Perhaps they do migrate at a later date, translating their imagination
into reality, but even if they never realize their dreams, the fact that
they leave school cannot be fully understood without reference to
their imagined lives as migrants. Thus, we advocate for incorporating
cognitive as well as corporal actions in studies that examine transna-
tional agency, though we acknowledge the difficulty in detecting
and measuring such intangible actions.
To summarize, "gendered geographies of power" is a framework
for analyzing people's social agency—corporal and cognitive—
given their own initiative as well as their positioning within multiple
hierarchies of power operative within and across many terrains.
Though this framework is not only applicable to transnational contexts,
we feel it is especially useful for analyzing these contexts in light of their
complexities. Thus, we can speak of a gendered geography of power
that maps the historically particularistic circumstances that a particu-
lar group of people experience, and be able to analyze them on mul-
tiple levels. However, we can also contemplate a less particularistic
448 Sarah }. Mahler and Patricia R. Pessar
gendered geography of power wherein different groups are located
vis-à-vis macro-level processes such as globalization, and trace
their efforts and ability at influencing these processes. In short, the
framework is intended to aid scholarly analysis of gender across
transnational spaces for case studies and comparative investigations.
Finally, the framework has been synthesized by the volume's editors
to help situate its papers within larger debates surrounding gender,

transnationalism, and migration. Thus, each paper has contributed
to the framework's theorization, though the authors do not apply
our framework explicitly. However, the papers serve as good ex-
amples for readers to test the utility of the conceptual framework.
CENTRAL THEMES FOUND IN THE VOLUME
Communication, citizenship and nation-state building, and discip-

lining of subjects are themes that transverse the essays in this volume.
These themes have not been adequately explored from the vantage
point of gender and transnationalism in the literature to date. In this
section we begin to apply the analytical framework outlined above,
viz., "gendered geography of power," to an examination of these
themes across the papers. We expect that this will elucidate women's
and men's differential access to and control over communication and
political entitlements within transnational contexts, and thus serve
as a model for others' work.
Several of the articles reveal that women's access to channels of
transnational communication is far more limited than men's. Yet
while being female carries disadvantages, this "liability" is modulated
by geographical and social location—that is, where social actors are
situated within a gendered geography of power. This is best illustrated
by positing a gendered geography of power that encompasses the
volume's papers such that group's agency can be compared. We start
by identifying groups' social locations within this gendered geo-
graphy of power. At one particularly disadvantaged site we find the
rural Salvadoran women with migrant husbands abroad whom
Mahler studies. These wives reside in one locale of a transnational
social field in which women and children predominate. Owing in
large part to gendered processes of war and displacement and, later,
to unintended consequences of U.S. immigration legislation that
have disproportionately benefited male Salvadoran refugees, these
women (in contrast to their more mobile husbands) remain physic-
ally tied to a place that Mahler characterizes as, "on the margins of
a nation peripheral to the rest of the world." In this technological
"backwater," migrant wives seeking to avail themselves of the promise
of time-space compression wait on long lines to gain access to the few
phones available locally. Once the phone connection to the United
States is made, the women often find themselves beseeching financi-
ally-scrapped, migrant partners first to accept their collect phone
calls and then to remain on the line while the women plead for
increased levels of remittance support.
At a different site within the gendered geography of power encom-
passing the volume's papers, we find the Guatemalan women treated
in Pessar's work. They are "fortunate" enough to have been officially
recognized as refugees and resettled in camps in southern Mexico
just when the refugee bureaucracy and international NGOs were
eager to create refugee women as a special, and in certain ways priv-
ileged, category of refugee. As residents of refugee camps, many of
these women were given favored access to global forms of discourse
and communication associated with their rights and entitlements as
women and as global citizens. Thus these women came to enjoy
access to communication far exceeding that known before their exile
or since their return.
Finally, positioned at the most privileged site in the papers' gen-
dered geography of power continuum found in this volume are the
German male clients Brennan examines. These men's geographical
location permits easy access to travel literature and postings on the
Internet about sex tourism. They are drawn to transnational "sex-
scapes" like Sosua, thanks both to the global flow of information
about sex workers and the desire it produces. Moreover, their easy
access to these places is facilitated by the men's geopolitical and
financial privileges. Paradoxically, although Sosua is located in their
own country, the Dominican sex workers commonly arrive there
with very little tangible knowledge about its living and working con-
ditions; moreover, their shame about making money through this
type of work mitigates against the wider sharing of this information.
Now we go beyond situating groups within their social locations
in the gendered geography of power and examine their agency.
When applied to issues of transnational communication, this emphasis
yields a number of questions: what actually flows into and across
transnational spaces and who has control over its production, content,
and directionality? This volume treats these important dimensions of
communication, noting in particular how they, and their outcomes,
are gendered. We focus here on the production and fashioning of
450 Sarah }. Mahler and Patricia R. Pessar
transnationally circulating images and meanings and examine their
impacts on women's and men's agencies. Often the intertwining of
gender, class, race, and ethnicity conspires to make women the
objects of representations that both "other" them and, at the very
least, imply low degrees of agency. This is vividly illustrated in the
case of Dominican sex workers. The global tourist industry as well as
Internet sex tourism sites objectify young, third world, women of col-
or. Through the alchemy of male desire and first-world privilege,
these women are refashioned as dusky beauties who are welcoming,
sultry, and submissive. The sex workers Brennan interviews take
pride in racialized images that cast them as surpassing European
women in their seductive powers and sexual prowess. Nonetheless,
Brennan concludes that far from these representations providing the
women with the means to forge strong attachments to male foreign
tourists and eventually to obtain much valued exit visas, they more
frequently reinforce the women's subordinate status, poverty, and
lack of mobility as compared to their first-world male clients.
Material objects, including commodities and remittances, are
additional elements that flow into and across transnational spaces.
The people initiating and receiving these flows are not situated
equally within the gendered geography of power, and the flows both
illustrate and reproduce these disparities. While sending remittances
can be interpreted as a mechanism through which migrants actually
level economic disparities—lowering their resources and bolstering
recipients'—the flows are not only of material significance. Rather,
they also communicate important matters of obligation, prestige,
and power that favor migrants while impacting gender ideologies
and relations. Such matters are clearly at play in the remittance strat-
egies of Haitian transmigrant women described in the paper by Fouron
and Glick Schiller. The women sustain female and male dependents
in Haiti through gifts of money and "modern" consumer goods.
Salvadoran male transmigrants similarly achieve more through their
remittance payments to their wives than mere sustenance; they also
promote male dominance by ensuring their wives' fidelity through
mobilizing the vigilance of the men's kin in El Salvador.
Finally, the kinds of images and messages communicated across
transnational spaces can significantly affect how people come to imagine
both actual or potential membership in larger collectivities, as well as
contacts with distant social actors and institutions. They also influ-
ence how people come to assess the possibilities and benefits of their
own or family members' actual mobility. Several of the papers in this
volume consider the gendered nature of this social imaginary. For
example, Pessar illustrates how through the aid of human rights and
women's rights discourses, Guatemalan women in Mexican refugee
camps expand their citizenship claims beyond the nation (Guate-
mala) to the globe. Unfortunately, the women become more adept at
imagining a more secure and empowered reincorporation in Guate-
mala than they do in actually negotiating these outcomes. Similarly,

their perceptions of themselves as full and equal members of a pro-
gressive, global community is sorely tested when their women's
organizations are threatened by hostile male returnee leaders; in
many instances the women's desperately worded faxes and e-mails
dispatched to international supporters go unanswered.
Brennan, too, emphasizes the gendered nature of the social imagin-
ary and how it has converted the once sleepy town of Sosua into a
raucous transnational meeting ground. Poor, single mothers are
drawn to Sosua by fantasies of escape from the limited range of oppor-
tunities available to uneducated women in the Dominican Republic.
Their "saviors" become white, first-world males who are imagined
as wealthier and more responsible providers than their Dominican
counterparts; and for many sex workers Germany becomes an idealized
new home. As discussed above, most male tourists arrive in Sosua
with fantasies of play and sexual abandon. A minority become
enmeshed in long-distance communication and social attachments.
But, far fewer ultimately "deliver" to the Dominican women the
much coveted, oft imagined visa to exit Sosua. Thus while "sex-
scapes" like Sosua may facilitate the fulfillment of fantasies of social
connection across gendered, national, and racial divides, the ability
actually to bridge these divides, and to sustain such contacts over
space and time, very much favor first world, white males.
If an abundance of information fires the imagination of men seek-
ing sexual adventure in Sosua, it is the lack of communication which
ignites the social imaginaries of the Salvadoran women Mahler stud-
ies. In their relatively isolated, rural communities these women hear
and embellish stories of Salvadoran men who find American part-
ners and then abandon their existing families. While the women lack
access both to routine forms of communication and to actual allies in
the U.S. willing to enforce male fidelity and responsibility, male
migrants enjoy far greater access to these channels and agents for the
disciplining of female partners residing in El Salvador.
While geographic and social location influence the degrees of
agency people exert within transnational contexts, so too does the
range of institutions with which they interact. This is best exempli-
fied in those articles in the volume that examine citizenship and
nation-state building. The key here is the gendered policies and
programs of states and intergovernmental and non-governmental
organizations with respect to de jure and substantive citizenship or
membership practices. These are the central concerns of Goldring's
paper. She finds that within Mexican state-mediated transnational

practices, the hegemonic notion that citizenship is predominately a
male prerogative is reproduced. Consequently, in contrast to their
male counterparts, migrant women are deprived access to the
increased power and social capital associated with development
projects jointly supported by migrant organizations, and government
coffers. This exclusion reinforces some women's resolve to pursue
political rights and entitlements within institutions in the United
States that the women perceive to be more attentive to their struggles
as women, in general, and as women of color, in particular. Fouron
and Glick Schiller's paper also examines citizenship and nation-
building. However, they highlight the experiences of Haitian women
who become empowered through political and social actualities in
both the U.S. and Haiti. Building on the substantive citizenship ex-
periences gained through the civil rights movement, anti-poverty move-
ment, and women's movement in the U.S., these women contribute
to a grassroots transnational political movement for social and economic
justice in Haiti. In so doing, they challenge the established Haitian
gender hierarchies in ways that contribute to a new imaginary of the
nation. At the same time, many of these women help maintain the
oppressive system, however unintentionally, through the remittances
they send to relatives. These remittances have become a major source
of Haiti's foreign exchange, financing the Haitian elites' ability to
sustain their positions. These elites, in turn, continue the gender hier-
archy embedded within their nation-state building project.
Pessar finds in her paper that Guatemalan refugee camps in
Mexico become transnational contexts that promote global discourses
of human rights and women's empowerment. In these camps, refu-
gees, with the help of international organizations, such as the
UNHCR, are enabled to think and act as agents who have the power
to affect nation-state policies and beyond. The organizations encour-
aged refugee women to envision a new Guatemala in which women,
in general, and poor, indigenous women, in particular, would enjoy
full citizenship rights and entitlements. She documents, however,
how at a highly strategic moment when the UNHCR came to negotiate
directly on behalf of the refugees with the Guatemalan State in their
request to return home, the Commission reversed its stance of pro-
viding female leaders with access to public fora and to empowering
channels of communication. Consequently, the refugee women were
marginalized from key informational and decision-making arenas
pertinent to the repatriation and resettlement processes. In sum, the
Guatemala to which they returned continues to be constructed upon

a foundation of women's daily subordination. Pessar's and Goldring's
work points to the ways in which patriarchal notions of national
belonging and citizenship entitlements may be transposed onto
transnational contexts and transnational processes when the state is
a principal agent. On a more hopeful note, the Guatemalan case also
suggests that in contrast to their conventional experiences in national
politics, women are playing a far more central role in today's global
civil society (Lister 1997).
A third theme is the disciplining of subjects' agency, a theme also
reflecting issues of power. Time and again people who strive to act
transnationally—principally women—are controlled by forces large-
ly outside their control. That is, in many cases this is not discipline in
the Foucauldian, internalized sense, but rather in its direct, repressive
manifestation. Goldring's paper demonstrates how the Mexican
state extends gender relations operative at family and household
levels, above all male dominance, to higher levels of influence as
it crafts a masculinist transnational politics. Women are excluded
as decision-makers and welcomed only to perform subordinate,
service-oriented tasks. Similarly, Pessar observes that men negotiat-
ing the Guatemalan Peace Accords embargo the interests women
have articulated in exile, disciplining their ability to translate
empowerment across borders. Mahler locates the vehicle for control
not in the state but rather in kinship norms; in-laws keep vigil over
migrants' wives fidelity. Moreover, the wives are beholden as well to
the receipt of remittances, which binds them yet again to fidelity lest
they risk abandonment and destitution.
Discipline is not always exerted overtly, however. A more subtle
form arises in the work of Fouron and Glick Schiller as they examine
how, for example, middle-class women are confined to the house-
hold by class-based mores of sexual propriety and family status.
Haiti provides no alternative space but to live by and reproduce
these norms. Emigrating to the U.S. appears to offer a transnational
escape, but when Haitian women settle abroad, they encounter new
obstacles of race, class, and legal status. Finally, we find that even in
the seemingly undisciplined sexscape described by Brennan, that
Dominican women find little actual liberation. Conversely, they cre-
ate a space of sexual abandon for European (and not Dominican)
men by conforming to and embodying the erotic stereotypes of
themselves marketed through the media.
MISSION AND LIMITATIONS OF THIS VOLUME
We acknowledge that, to date, a few scholars have called for

incorporating gender into transnational studies, migration in particu-
lar (e.g., Georges 1992; Sutton 1992). In general, though, and as
Michael Kearney noted in an important 1995 Annual Review of
Anthropology article on the anthropology of globalization and trans-
nationalism, these literatures are "notably silent on gender issues"
(Kearney 1995:560). Our intervention began in 1996 during the meet-
ings of the American Ethnological Society held in Puerto Rico, when
the silence was questioned. This was followed by a panel dedicated
to the "engendering of transnational migration" at the American
Anthropological Associations meetings in November 1997. In June
1998, a workshop was held at the Humanities Research Institute
at the University of California, Irvine to refine ideas and identify
researchers who might submit papers for this volume. In February of
1999, authors' first drafts were critiqued at a special conference
entitled "Engendering Theories of Transnational Migration" held
at Yale University. Subsequently, papers were submitted for peer
review through this journal.1
Despite years of effort, we fully realize that in this volume we raise
as many questions as we answer. Gender continues to be an area
sorely in need of greater attention and theorization in the transna-
tional literature. These papers take several strides in that direction.
We know from our experience that this is a complex and difficult
task. Indeed in the course of working toward and publishing this
volume we have had to accommodate more often than assert, start
over as frequently as finish. We have also had to acknowledge our
limitations as much as rejoice in our contributions. It is to these
limitations that we turn now, however, for in them we hope to sow
the seeds that can be reaped in the future.
One of the volume's shortcomings is its reliance upon studies con-
ducted in the Americas. To a large degree, this emphasis reflects the
composition of our own scholarly networks and the fact that many
Americanists have enthusiastically embraced a transnational approach
to their research. Nonetheless, we made every effort to solicit and
nurture work that extends beyond this geographic concentration;
ultimately, though we did receive some submissions that explore
gender in transnational contexts outside the Americas, they are not
included here. This is due, in part, to the fact that we were asking
scholars to subject their data to a type of analysis that is less common
and well-developed for certain contexts and subjects (e.g., Indone-
sian refugees). We sincerely hope that this volume will encourage

additional research and theory development, and that it will stimu-
late others to broaden the geographical range with which we study
gender across transnational spaces.
Other hurdles we have faced and that are common to transna-
tional studies are methodological. How can good transnational
research be accomplished? There are no set guidelines, though there
are useful recommendations (e.g., Marcus 1998). Much work on gender
and migration, however, has limited its purview to the investigation
of gender in either the receiving or sending communities, though
collecting data in the multitude of locations germane to peoples liv-
ing in transnational contexts and social fields would yield richer
data. We understand that there are good reasons for limiting the
breadth of fieldwork, such as time and budgetary constraints, and
we are not critical of these studies so long as they do not make claims
about gender transnationally. However, we need to develop methods
of inquiry that can bring a true transnational optic to the study of
gender.
Another difficulty we have encountered but not overcome is how
to measure shifts in gender relations. If the point of comparison is
"traditional" versus contemporary relations, how is "traditional"
defined and how is this baseline established, especially when historical
research is lacking or inadequate (see, for example, Mahler 1999)?
Additionally, to an important extent assessment lies in the eye of the
beholder. Women and men will evaluate change using measures that
are most meaningful and germane to their realities, not necessarily
adopting a universal gauge of gender parity. In some of these cases,
recollection must be validated as an appropriate source of data and
not forsaken as hopelessly subjective owing to the "warping" forces
of nostalgia (see Pessar this volume).
Another possible form of appraisal is by examining people's
access to resources with respect to gender. This is an approach
employed by most papers in the volume. Do women and men enjoy
similar entrée to structures of power and to mediums of communica-
456 Sarah } . Mahler and Patricia R. Pessar
tion and how does gender assist in understanding the positions that
different sexes occupy and act from? Alternatively, the gauge can be
set at parity and gender relations measured along a scale of proxim-
ity to parity. This method is also beset by problems, for how would
parity be operationalized when there is such diversity in tasks per-
formed by males and females? More importantly to us, setting parity
as the barometer dooms measurement of gender to disappointment.

We see in our own lives, as in the lives of women and men we have
studied, relations that do not approximate parity yet mark real gains.
For example, many of the Guatemalan refugee women studied by
Pessar have not won the right to own property like their male coun-
terparts. They now realize, however, that they have a claim to the
land and that they are not alone in their struggle, for they can solicit
assistance from national and international allies. Similarly, we see
that despite the fact that living in transnational contexts can exacer-
bate tensions between the sexes, as seen vividly in Mahler's contri-
bution to this volume, we also find evidence to the contrary. In the
articles by Fouron and Glick Schiller and by Brennan, we see some
women creatively taking advantage of the uneven opportunities
available to them across transnational spaces to negotiate an improve-
ment in their status and in their relationships with their families.
Some steps are larger than others and it is critical not to attribute to
transnational processes any blanket narrative of liberation. Rather,
we see in these papers an emphasis on how the socio-economic, tem-
poral and spatial forces that ground and discipline transnational
spaces and ties can also open avenues for emancipation from some
of these same forces. As stated earlier, the authors herein identify
ways that people's actions transcend borders, but do not see them as
operating in some hyperspace decoupled from their social moorings.
The challenge is to see people's "everyday actions as a form of cultural
politics embedded in specific power contexts" (Ong 1999:5), but also
to see how these politics/actions can affect those power contexts, i.e.
gendered geographies of power. Such a challenge sets out a mode of
measurement that does not establish fixed steps or goals but sees
empowerment at an ongoing dynamic within the broad context of a
power geometry.
To conclude, our intention in publishing this volume is to provide
some insights and directions for further study of gender in transna-
tional contexts and to encourage other scholars to engage this issue in
their work. By no means do we consider this volume to be a definitive
statement on the subject; quite conversely, we view this as yet one more
conjuncture in an already lengthy process of bringing gender into
social science research in general. We deeply appreciate those whose
work has already inspired us and we look ahead with anticipation
toward the future work that we know will continue to carry the torch.
NOTE
1. We would like to thank the many individuals who participated in all phases of this
project and who shared their ideas, counsel, and encouragement with us. We also
gratefully acknowledge the support received from our funders: the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Califor-
nia, Irvine, and Yale University's Center for International and Area Studies.
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PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of

Sarah J. Mahler and Patricia R. Pessar

This volume reflects many scholars' efforts to interrogate the role

geographies of power," later on in the volume's introduction. The

CONCEPTUAL GROUNDING: GENDER AND TRANSNATIONAL

An essential element for developing a theoretical framework for

Indeed, in this volume several authors articulate gender with other

above. While we acknowledge that in some examples of transna-

agency (Alicea 1997; Bernai 1997; Goldring 1996; Grasmuck and

BUILDING OUR CONCEPTUAL MODEL: GENDERED GEOGRAPHIES

To help us better study gender across transnational space, we, the

Salvador must struggle harder than migrants from urban areas to

"geographic scales" we add two final dimensions to complete our

to help situate its papers within larger debates surrounding gender,

CENTRAL THEMES FOUND IN THE VOLUME

Communication, citizenship and nation-state building, and discip-

mala than they do in actually negotiating these outcomes. Similarly,

paper. She finds that within Mexican state-mediated transnational

Guatemala to which they returned continues to be constructed upon

MISSION AND LIMITATIONS OF THIS VOLUME

We acknowledge that, to date, a few scholars have called for

sian refugees). We sincerely hope that this volume will encourage

as the barometer dooms measurement of gender to disappointment.

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