‘Are we falling apart?’: manufacturing familyhood through transnationalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article initiates methodological discussions to understand how transnationalism manufactures cultural discourse of family practices and repairs intimacy within family-kin relationships from a distance. Prior studies in family ties overstate the shifts in family practices by highlighting the dichotomy of ‘modern’ and ‘tradition’ intimacy. However, family practices and intimacy are more compelling, and require empirical examination of how migrants interact and restore meaningful relationships in different cultural landscapes with their family-kin. Contributing to this literature, this article explores the repairing process of transnationalism in building meaningful familiar relationships from a distance, and the reconfiguration of the meanings and practices of familyhood in the migration process. Drawing on insight from interview data gathered from transnational Turkish migrants in the UK, this article argues that migration does not merely transform the family-kin practices, the understanding of intimacy and personal life of migrants; it brings emotional and ontological security. This paper raises questions on the role of migration in repairing intimacy and family practices, rather than shift and disjuncture the familiar connections. Therefore, it negotiates how migration provides space and courage to migrants to repair their intimacy and relationships with family-kin and reconfigure the meaning of familyhood while they enact their lives transnationally.