CARING ACROSS "HERE" AND "THERE": THE EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF TRANSNATIONAL GRANDPARENTING

Abstract

Grandparents have been stereotyped as dependent and elderly, despite varying in age, vulnerability and health. From associating ageing with vulnerability and dependency, scholarship on transnational families and older subjects tends to characterise grandparents as immobile, left-behind dependents. However, this ignores their agency as mobile care-providers for their grandchildren, and their ability to sustain transnational family solidarities. This thesis thus centralises grandparents in transnational care mobilities, by examining their emotions inherent in performing care and structuring kin work. By integrating Wolf’s (2002) concept of emotional transnationalism with Baldassar and Merla’s (2014) approach of care circulation, this thesis explores how the flows of emotions and care across transnational space elucidate the emotional geographies of transnational grandparenting. To achieve this aim, this thesis seeks to address two objectives. Firstly, to explore how the emotions of transnational grandparents, who care for their grandchildren overseas, are mediated across transnational spaces between their home and host countries. Secondly, to examine how this spatiality of emotions shapes transnational families and informs notions of care. This thesis draws on semi-structured interviews and participant-produced photographs with ethnically Chinese transnational parents and grandparents from China and Singapore who care for their grandchildren overseas. Hence, this thesis argues that emotions in transnational care mobilities are (re)shaped and (re)structured over proximate and distant spaces, being mediated by Chinese cultural norms, gendered roles and relations in care, and intergenerational tensions. Against the Anglocentric conception of care as universal and undifferentiated, this thesis found that Chinese understandings and practices of care and familyhood are heterogeneous across generations and transnational space. This elucidates how Chinese cultural norms and values are differentially expressed in family structures and power relations, as well as beliefs in grandparenting and care. In doing so, this thesis makes a modest contribution to scholarship on transnationalism and care, by explicating how emotional spaces (re)produce relations and practices of care, and re-constructing grandparents from static care-recipients to mobile care-givers.