Elaine Bauer

Challenging gender practices: Intersectional narratives of sibling relations and parent-child engagements in transnational serial migration

This article aims to contribute to the currently sparse literature on transnational families and gender. It focuses on the retrospective accounts of Caribbean-born adults who as children were serial migrants, joining their parents in the UK following a period of separation. It considers aspects of their relationships with their siblings and with their mothers and fathers. The article illuminates what the serial migrants viewed as contradictory everyday practices that produced ‘non-shared environments’. It discusses three ways in which transnationalism appeared to be a central part of the serial migrants’ family lives. First, it was embodied. Second, it was lived as cultural difference between Caribbean-born and UK-born siblings. Third, it was reported to be evident in parental practices. The article illustrates the importance of viewing gendered narratives in a psychosocial intersectional perspective.

Practising kinship care: Children as language brokers in migrant families

Language brokering is an activity whereby children interpret and translate for their migrant parents who have not yet learned the language of the new country. The majority of the studies have been conducted among children and adolescents, primarily exploring the psychological and emotional impact on the child and the development of the parent–child relationship resulting from the activity. These studies report mixed results ranging from negative to positive outcomes. Largely unexplored, however, is the practical contributions children make to their families and to their communities in their activities as language brokers. This article uses data from a UK Economic and Social Research Council Professorial Fellowship programme of work entitled ‘Transforming experiences: Re-conceptualising identities and “non-normative” childhoods’ to explore the retrospective childhood experiences of adults from migrant families who have grown up interpreting and translating for their parents in sometimes complex and sensitive situations where adults are usually in control. It examines some of the consequences of the activity in terms of the benefits and drawbacks. It also highlights how from both practical and cultural perspectives, child language and cultural brokering could be understood as one of the many ways that children of migrants contribute to the settlement and functioning of their families, and in the process, practice and learn about kinship care at an early age. Thus, although there may be some limitations to the activity, there are also significant benefits.

Racialized citizenship, respectability and mothering among Caribbean mothers in Britain

ABSTRACT Holy matrimony, nuclear family, attending church, education and good manners are typical markers of respectability. These Victorian middle-class ideological values were transported to the British Caribbean region after emancipation of slavery by missionaries and priests aiming to “civilize” the ex-slaves. As social values they were often transformed or met in opposition with a more complex set of cultural and social values within Caribbean creole communities. Over time, however, some individuals adopted these Eurocentric values, thus prescribing to a form of racialized citizenship. Upon migration to Britain in the 1960s, some migrant mothers endeavoured to transmit these values among their children, in an effort to integrate and develop a sense of identity and belonging, but also as modes of resistance to experiences of racism and discrimination. This paper illustrates the tensions experienced by two migrant Caribbean mothers, and their concerns that the social values of respectability are being lost among their offspring.