The “Connected” Caregivers: Exploring the Interplay of Left-Behind Women’s Socio-Structural Immobilities and Communicative Mobilities in Transnational Power Geometries

The “Connected” Caregivers: Exploring the Interplay of Left-Behind Women’s Socio-Structural Immobilities and Communicative Mobilities in Transnational Power Geometries

Left-Behind Women, Transnational Family, Digital Media, Im/mobilities, Rural China

Drawing on an ethnographic study on different groups of left-behind women (mothers, aunts, and grandmothers) in Fuqing, a major transnational migrant-labor-sending area in China, this article examines how they collaborate with their overseas family members in childrearing through digital media use. Applying the “im/mobilities” framework, this study explains how different leftbehind caregivers use mediated communication as communicative mobilities to negotiate family roles and relationships in situated transnational power geometry. Despite the common structural constraints (rural patriarchy and inadequate social resources), left-behind women’s sociostructural immobilities vary depending on their specific relationship with migrants (conjugal, kinship, and intergenerational dynamics), which embodies the asymmetrical nature of transnationalism. The findings highlight the dynamic negotiation between left-behind caregivers’ communicative mobilities and their contextualized socio-structural immobilities, which leads to diverse forms of agency and disempowerment. This article shows that communicative mobility is not only manifested as media use but also embodied as media (non)use.

Hong Chen

https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/27/2/zmac003/6548837

Oxford University Press

25 January 2022.

Sri Wahyuni

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English

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Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 00 (2022)