Keynote Speech

“Migrant Mothers and the Varieties of Absent Children”

Professor Nicole Constable

Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh

Abstract

How do one’s biological children, perhaps the most familial of kin, become (un)familiar strangers through contemporary processes, technologies, and practices of migration and separation, and how, in the process of migration, conventional and unconventional sorts of families are made and unmade? Taking a two-pronged approach, I explore the link between an on-the-ground ethnographic and affective approach to “people” with a more “mid-range” and distanced approach to the institutions and expert knowledge, the “global assemblages,” that promote and shape the practices and forms of migratory separation of biological mothers and their children. Based primarily on stories told by Indonesian and Filipino migrant women in Hong Kong about a spectrum of different sorts of absent children, this essay builds on previous studies of “left-behind children,” calling for greater attention to the spectrum of sorts of absent children, and to queer or less normative or forms of migratory families.