Open AccessResilience of Gendered Spheres in Transnational Migration: An Interpretive Book Review of Sheba Mariam George’s When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration
Author(s) -
José Luis Pontijas Calderón
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
the qualitative report
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.335
H-Index - 35
ISSN - 2160-3715
DOI - 10.46743/2160-3715/2009.2836
Subject(s) - gender studies , sociology , ethnography , immigration , politics , political science , anthropology , law
Dr. Sheba George’s ethnographic study based using participant observation and purposive sampling and an insider transnational journey to examine changes in family and social roles that result when nurses from Kerala, India immigrate to the US ahead of their husbands. The author concludes that the economic and political gain immigration affords nurses does not translate into enhanced social status for their family in India or for their husbands in the US when they undergo gender transferral to homemaker. This transference causes a shift in gender structure from the home to the community, in this case the church as a way of counteracting the social emasculation Kerali men experience. This review cross culturally examines the resilience of patriarchal cultural mores and gender roles when Kerali and Puerto Rican immigrant men face the prospect of social emasculation; Puerto Ricans are examined from an insiders perspective.