1. Nicole Constable University of Pittsburgh ncgrad@pitt.edu
Migrant Mothers and the Varieties of Absent Children International Symposium: Transnational Class and Citizenship ILCAA Joint Program on Child Migration in Asia May 20, Rikkyo University , Tokyo
Nicole Constable
University of Pittsburgh

2. Introduction
How do people’s biological children become (un)familiar strangers through contemporary processes, technologies, and practices of migration and separation?
How, in the process of migration, are conventional and unconventional familes made and unmade?

3. Introduction:
Two-pronged approach to the practices and forms of migratory separation of biological mothers and their children:
on-the-ground ethnographic and affective approach to “people”
“mid-range” and distanced approach to the institutions and expert knowledge and “global assemblages” (Ong and Collier 2005)

4. Introduction
Ethnographic focus on stories told by migrant women in Hong Kong about different sorts of absent children
Builds on previous studies of “left-behind children” but departs from them
Calls for greater attention to the spectrum of sorts of absent children, and to queer or less normative or forms of migratory families.

5. Introduction
Recent large-scale surveys examine left behind children in two-parent migrant families in which one or both parents migrate. They support the view that these children are better off than commonly assumed, and are materially, educationally, physically, and emotionally better off than children in two-parent non-migrant families (e.g. Asis 2006; Graham & Jordan 2011; Graham et al. 2012; Hoang et al. 2014, Hoang & Yeoh 2012)

6. Introduction
However methodologically useful a two-parent family (married or not) is for survey purposes, they serve to highlight certain familial patterns and to obscure others.
My goal is to shift the focus away from heteronormative two-parent families and the associated left-behind children, and to focus instead on the sorts of families and absent children that are overlooked or obscured by such a lens.

7. Spectrum of absent children
Introduction
Spectrum of absent children
Temporary separations Permanent separations
 
fostering international adoption
local caregivers death
runaways
child migrants

8. Introduction
Part 1: VIGNETTES
Stories of mother-child separations, affect, experience, and the spectrum of absences
Part 2: GLOBAL ASSEMBLAGES
Migratory regulations, circulations of media, NGO reports, and other forms of “expert knowledge” -- including scholarship -- that shape migration, migratory families, and our understandings of them are all relevant

9. Introduction
Scholarship/expert knowledge can reflect & (re)produce normative hegemonic views of migratory processes & families.
Non-normative family formations, or queer families (that do not follow dominant/ normative monogamous, marital, or sexual expectations) are obscured by some forms of knowledge & revealed by others.
Single mothers, gay/lesbian migrants with children, or absent children (largely excluded from migration studies) reveal less hegemonic & normative possibilities and practices.

10. Ethnographic Vignettes: The Spectrum of Absent Children
Left-Behind Children, Fostering & Temporary Care-Giving
Indah and her children
Adoption & “Selling” Babies
Mia, Ree & Other stories
Death, Suicide, & “Thrown Away” Babies
Abortion
Repulse Bay Family

11. Global Assemblages
This approach requires that we shift focus from the ethnographic vignettes and look instead at the global patterns, networks, and knowledge systems that shape the global assemblage of women’s labor migration and the making and unmaking of families across time and space.

12. Global Assemblages
Attention to assemblages marks a theoretical shift from closed, demarcated or localized social spaces conventionally studied by anthropologists and other social scientists.
Also reflect what Deleuze (1992) and Foucault (1979) described as a shift from “disciplinary societies” -- in which there are enclosed spaces such as prisons, hospitals, or schools --- toward the newer “societies of control” in which controls reach beyond conventional institutional or social spaces.

13. Global Assemblages Global assemblages of organ donation involve:
“networks of brokers and dealers, donors and recipients, [and] sellers and buyers who interact in various moral and money economies, and through various forms of technical and political regulation”
---Collier 2010:400
Much the same applies to migrant workers and their families

14. Conclusion: Queering Migrant Families and the Spectrum of Absent Children
“My own approach is to look at practices, i.e. the focus is not on ‘people’ but social and institutional practices that are largely observable in the public realm….You ‘stay close to practice’ i.e., abstract your claims from observable practices that seem constitutive of emerging situations. By following practices … we avoid intruding too much into people’s lives (or respect the limits they imposed on our observations)” --- A. Ong interviewed by V. Sinha, 2010:

15. Conclusion: Queering Migrant Families and the Spectrum of Absent Children
Combine an affective ethnographic approach to “people” and global assemblages
Academic and scholarly stories we tell about migrant families and absent children can (re)shape, reinforce, or contribute to new hegemonic assumptions of normativity
Migratory families are made and unmade through assemblages and affect

16. Thank You!