ABSTRACT
Feminist geography has always been interested in the interaction between social relations and place. So migration and the changes brought about by people's movement through space have always been high on the feminist geography agenda. As some have argued, “there tends to be both a deep utopic hope that transnationalism may offer opportunities to realign and equalise gender relations, and a knowing scepticism that patriarchal relations return in different guises in different times and places” (Pratt and Yeoh, 2003: 161). This work is based on the assumption that migration brings about social change, potentially disrupting patriarchal structures (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1984 and 2000; Pessar and Mahler, 2003; Pessar, 1999; Silvey, 2004), and creating new spaces where gender relations can be renegotiated and reconfigured (Pratt and Yeoh, 2003). As such, it raises direct questions in relation to the imbalance of power relations of gender, class and ethnicity, including issues of justice and the distribution of resources in a given society.
