In this article I address transnational intergenerational relations between Filipino migrant mothers and their young adult children and examine how families achieve intimacy across great distances. I do this by identifying and examining the transnational communication methods Filipino migrant families use to develop intimacy, in other words familiarity, across borders. In my analysis, I address how political economy and gender shape the dynamics of transnational communication. By showing how economic conditions and gender shape transnational family communication, I provide a socially thick lens through which to understand the formation of transnational intimacy and emphasize how larger systems of inequality shape the lives of the children left behind by the global migration of women.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Studies.An increasing number of Filipina migrants are mothering their children from a distance. In order to provide for their families, they must leave them behind in the Philippines and take advantage of the greater labor market opportunities in other countries of Asia, Europe, and the Americas. One of the largest sources of independent female labor migrants in the world, the Philippines has seen the formation of a growing number of female-headed transnational families.' These families are households with core members living in at least two nation-states and in which the mother works in another country while some or all of her dependents reside in the Philippines. This article analyzes the emotional consequences of geographical distance in female-headed transnational families and examines the mechanisms by which mothers and children cope with them.Without a doubt, mothering from a distance has emotional ramifications both for mothers who leave and children who are sent back or left behind. The pain of family separation creates various feelings, including helplessness, regret, and guilt for mothers and loneliness, vulnerability, and insecurity for children. How are these feelings negotiated in the social reproduction of the transnational family?2 Moreover, how are these feelings influenced by gender ideologies of mothering? The practice of mothering from a distance or "transnational mothering," as Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Emestine Avila have called it, ruptures the ideological foundation of the Filipino family.3 Unlike the "split households" of earlier Chinese, Mexican, and Filipino male migrants in the United States, the traditional division of labor with the father in

This article examines the politics of reproductive labor in globalization. Using the case of migrant Filipina domestic workers, the author presents the formation of a three-tier transfer of reproductive labor in globalization between the following groups of women: (1) middle-class women in receiving nations, (2) migrant domestic workers, and (3) Third World women who are too poor to migrate. The formation of this international division of labor suggests that reproduction activities, as they have been increasingly commodified, have to be situated in the context of the global market economy. This division of labor is a structural process that determines the migration of Filipina domestic workers. As such, this article also uses in-depth interviews to examine and enumerate the contradictions that migrant Filipina domestic workers experience in their family and work lives as a result of “being in the middle” of this division of labor.

This article examines the mobility patterns of migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates. It identifies and explains the emergence of serial labor migration, which we define as the multi-country, itinerant labor migration patterns of temporary low-skilled migrant workers. It argues that policy contexts shaping temporary labor migration, as they impose precarious and prohibitive conditions of settlement in both countries of origin and destination, produce the itinerancy of low-skilled migrant workers. We offer a holistic analysis of the migration process of temporary labor migrants, shifting away from a singular focus on the process of emigration, integration, or return and toward an examination of each stage as a co-constitutive step in the migration cycle. Our analytic approach enables us to illustrate the state of precarity and itinerancy that follows low-wage migrant workers across the various stages of the migration cycle and produces serial migration patterns among migrant domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia.