02 / Women who move too much: relocating culture, reproducing
home
A Laundry List of Questions to be Aired
Where
do women stand today in relation to stereotypes of being bound
to the home, immobilized by the very structure of the house
that it is her job to maintain, and of being watched and domesticated
inside this supposedly static, private space? Though seen
traditionally to be the quieter, less mobile sex whose job
it was to bring harmony and order to the home and not to partake
of the man's active public life, women were actually the gender
who circulated and mixed in order to create new families.
She traditionally left her own family and moved to become
part of the man's family. However, this had negative associations
as women were perceived as interlopers, and so women's mobility
was viewed as sexual, and even excessive - something to be
controlled since her body showed that she was not properly
bounded biologically.
In the
last few decades dramatic changes have been made in the concept
and activity of the home and women's role in this realm, though
the economic and social roots of these changes have been different
in North America and Western Europe than in Eastern Europe.
How has this affected women who have relocated across this
boundary permanently, or those who shuttle constantly between
these societies? As women today establish careers and public
lives, do they find it necessary to move in geographic, political,
and economic terms more than men, and what impact does this
have on their relation to home? Now that women generally migrate
further away from their immediate families, and partners with
children sometimes need to be in separate locales to pursue
economic and personal fulfillment, how does that create new
types of homes? Also, how do women reproduce home not only
in terms of time, from generation to generation, but also
by relocating their native culture to new places? Do women
have an advantage in this increasingly interconnected world
whose hallmark is communication and technology that may have
the ability to build new communities or bring diasporic groups
together in new formations.
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