Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
avoiding “the tendency towards essentializing accounts of whiteness by locating race as
one of many social relations that shape individual and group identity…. A third wave
perspective sees whiteness as a multiplicity of identities that are historically grounded,
class specific, politically manipulated and gendered social locations that inhabit local
custom and national sentiments within the context of the new 'global village'” (Twine
and Gallagher 2008, 6).
In order to understand how white migrants reinstall themselves as privileged subjects
inaglobalarena,Iusetheconceptof“whitecapital,”whichiselaboratedthroughPierre
Bourdieu's (1994) forms of capital (social, economic, cultural, and symbolic), and is
here employed as a form of cultural capital that is convertible into other forms of cap-
ital. White capital is interlinked with (transnational) institutions, citizenships, a white
(Western)
habitus
, and other resources that are transferable cross-nationally. Follow-
ing the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed (2007), I discuss whiteness as a form of
habit
, as
second nature, that defines what bodies do, how they are repeated, and also shapes what
bodies
can do
, and, I would add, what they
choose
to do.
The women's specific migratory experiences are used as a point of departure to un-
derstand how gender- and nation-specific forms of white capital are upheld, converted,
or challenged through migration, and further how embodied privileges travel, as well as
how people may invest in whiteness as a form of identity politics (Lipsitz 1995). White
privilegesareexperiencedinmanyways,buttheyoftenremainnormalizedandinvisible
to the subjects that embody them. In this sense, the complexities of “white capital” as a
culturalresourcethatmaybetransferredtodifferentcontextsaswellasbeingconverted
into new forms of capital, is experienced intersectionally with other axes of power, such
asgenderandclass,astheboundariesofthesecategoriesaredrawninthelocalcontexts
(Skeggs 1997; Twine 2010).
Transnational (White) Migration
As feminist research shows, transnational migration constitutes a deeply gendered phe-
nomenonthat organizes and(trans)forms thelives ofwomen andmenindifferent ways.
Women and men inhabit different social spaces and networks as migrants, and their so-
ciallocationsarereconstructedindifferentnationalandregionalcontextsandinrelation
to the labor market, the house hold, and the community. Research on white migration,
referring broadly to migration from or within the Western world, shows that gender, as
well as race and class restructure white migrant women's positions in the new society,
a situation that is negotiated through national ideologies of gender, sexuality, and race
(Leonard 2008).
By including white European migrants in the analytical frame of transnational migra-
tion, my aim is to broaden and deepen debates about migrating experiences and focus
