The Cyclical Oppression of the Migratory Mother

What attracted me most throughout this reading was the focus on the mother migrant home and the implications that this has on the family and their community as reinforcing traditional gender roles regardless of the ideology presumed at the migration of the mother. The article outlines the migrating female as more capable of resettling "more fully than men" meaning that she is able to send more of her earnings back to the family in the Phillipines but also more importantly, that because of few opportunities for female employment in the original country, and the equity they have gained in their new host country, they are less likely to move back to their original nation state (Pratt and Yeoh 161). However, as outlined in Rhacel Parrenas's Children of Migration, this can have many implications for the family and society this mother has left behind. In contrast to male migrant homes, the fathers that are "left behind" are less socially accepted at community centers such as churches and schools that would allow support to the family because of his need to maintain constructed standards of masculinity(Parrenas 50). Additionally, migratory female families, though not always, are at more of a risk of a emasculated father acting out by woman/child battering (54). This creates a paradox in the relation of men and women in the social sphere. "Left behind" women, because of their families use of traditional patriarchal roles and her husband's bread winnings abroad, are more socially accepted and empowered in society, whereas "left behind" men are more socially rejected (54). Not only are men more socially alienated but may suffer from "downward occupational mobility"(Pratt and Yeoh 161). As a result women while more autonomous, fulfilling more roles in the family and in society, she also maintains more responsibilities that may seem limiting. Ultimately, traditional gender conventions work against the families of migratory mothers, while enabling the empowerment of women over men.
The implications that transnational families has on gender relations is "not only contradictory and complex" but also affords a new lens through which to view feminist theory (Patt and Yeoh 160). In looking closer at the paradox created between men and women, it is understood that migratory mothers "embody contradictory constructs of gender" and ultimately are able to work toward the "denaturalization of mothering acts" (Parrenas 118). This denaturalization of traditional gender norms adds to theories put forth by feminist scholars such as Judith Butler and Adrienne Rich who argue that the mothering instinct while rhetorically composed to seem natural, is in actuality socially constructed through the use of phallocentric language. However, in the absence of mothers, fathers do not usually take on all of the care giving responsibilities that she has abandoned, and they are instead passed off to the "dutiful daughters" and "overextended kin" (118).  In passing off the nurturing and domestic responsibilities left to the fathers to the female members of an extended family, the child will suffer from a sense of abandonment which will be neutralized by the now responsible kin (140). The child's family will then recreate the traditional patriarchal roles in an effort to forgo the child's feelings of abandonment which ultimately reinforces traditionally held gender roles that the mother has ideologically rejected in her act of migration (119). In effect, these families are failing to adapt to a new ideology that does not rely upon gender and patriarchal roles and is instead reinforcing those roles and reinforcing the socially alienated position of the migratory mother.