When the Expatriate Wife Returns Home: Swedish Women Navigating National Welfare Politics and Ideals of Gender Equality in Expatriate Family Migration

This chapter analyses how expatriate women navigate national political ideals formulated around gender equality and the dual-earner model upon their return to Sweden. The study is based on 46 in-depth interviews and participant observation conducted in a network for returning migrant women in Sweden. The vast majority were married to Swedish men working in transnational companies and had returned to Sweden due to their husbands’ completed expatriate contracts. As the women had been situated outside the formal labour market during their time abroad, they had no work experience or pensionable income in the Swedish welfare system, which is based on the idea that women and men share labour- and family-related work. Hence, their positions as ‘trailing spouses’ had a severe impact on their opportunities for reintegration into Swedish society. On the one hand, the women’s work enabled their husband’s mobility and working life in transnational companies. On the other, national social benefits did not take this (gendered) work into account. Thus, the women continued to depend on their husband’s income and private insurances back in Sweden, located in-between different ‘global’ market-based solutions and a national welfare system.

Migration, Mobility and Transnational Families: The Case of Indian Women Migrating to South Africa

The history of labour migration to South Africa spans centuries. More recently flows of skilled and unskilled, documented and undocumented migration to South Africa have reached significant proportions. While men have predominated in the flows of migration streams to South Africa, the feminisation of migration has increased the visibility and role of women in the migration context. The impact of migration on the lives of skilled married women has been given little attention in the migration literature. Characterised as trailing spouses in the broader migration literature, the article explores, through a life-course framework, how skilled Indian women renegotiate their lives when leaving secure jobs to follow their spouses to a foreign country. Attention is given to how mobility is negotiated between the spouses, the impact of mobility on the family and the influence of transnationalism on the migrants and their families in South Africa. The article is based on exploratory research using qualitative in-depth interviews conducted with married skilled Indian women who migrated as co-dependents to South Africa.

“Out of time”: A temporal view on identity change in trailing spouses

Previous research on expatriate families has often emphasized the negative impact of relocation on female trailing spouses’ well-being. In contrast to male employees who are sheltered from identity discontinuity by institutional frameworks, female trailing spouses often face a sudden loss of essential social and psychological functions that establish identities, such as a sense of belonging, professional achievement, and social interactions. This phenomenological study seeks to add to the discussions about the trailing spouse phenomenon by applying the role of time experience to the understanding of identity disruption and reconstruction. Although global mobility, migration, and cultural integration encompass dynamic changes in time experience, time and temporality are seldom used as central frameworks to understand how identities are transformed in the course of cultural change. Therefore, focusing on the time aspect in trailing spouses’ narratives may provide insight into identity loss and construction processes. This study included in-depth interviews with 12 trailing mothers (ages 27–42 years) who relocated to the Netherlands or the United States for a limited time period to support their husband’s career. Interviews were performed face to face or by video-chat and the data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Narratives indicated that the experience of time was a significant power in shaping trailing mothers’ emotions, motivations, and behaviors during the relocation period. Specifically, three independent, interrelated attitudes toward time emerged: increased awareness of time constraints, diminished sense of time, and permanent temporariness. Taken together, these attitudes represent a failure to mourn the loss of important psychological and social aspects that once structured their lives. A failure to acknowledge this loss may limit the trailing spouses’ ability to reconstruct identities in their new home and to engage in meaningful social and professional networks.

Challenging hegemonic femininities? The discourse of trailing spouses in Hong Kong

While the notion of hegemonic masculinity has received a lot of attention in recent scholarship, hegemonic femininity remains largely underdeveloped. We aim to address this gap by illustrating the benefits of using the concept of hegemonic femininities in sociolinguistic scholarship. Conducting a case study on the discourse of trailing spouses in Hong Kong, we analyse hegemonic femininities at the local, regional, and global level and explore how they are interlinked with each other. Findings show how these trailing spouses often challenge and reject hegemonic femininities on the local level, but largely accept and reinforce them on the regional and global level. The specific femininities that are considered to be hegemonic are highly context-dependent, and, unlike masculinities, the hegemony of femininities is a matter of internal degree—that is, certain femininities take hegemonic status compared to other femininities but do not take a dominant position in the gender order. (Hegemonic femininities, hegemonic masculinities, trailing spouses, Hong Kong, gender order)*