ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors argue that especially the relation between gender, mobility and cosmopolitanism needs further attention. Most of the existing expatriate literature has focused primarily on individual, mostly male, expatriates. If gender aspects are addressed at all, these are narrowed down to the following perspectives each of which focuses on individual actors: accompanying wives, female expatriates, and accompanying husbands. First, research on gender relations and mobility of expatriates has concentrated on so-called female "trailing spouses"—that is, women accompanying their husbands on foreign assignments. In order to analyze the gendered and relational aspects of expatriate everyday life, the authors introduces three different sets of activities—mobility work, local attachment work, and translocal attachment work—which played crucial roles in enabling, shaping, and stabilizing the entangled mobilities and supposedly cosmopolitan lifestyles of corporate expatriates. Studies addressing the traditional expatriate couple as such have also focused on the decrease of conjugal intimacy in expatriate couples in consequence of a polarized gender arrangement.
