Mothering Across Borders
A Personal and Philosophical Exploration of Migrant Motherhood, Care, and Belonging
Keywords:
migrant motherhood;, ethics of care, belonging, displacement, transnational identityAbstract
This essay offers a personal and philosophical reflection on migrant motherhood as an experience shaped by displacement, care, language, memory, and belonging. Written from the perspective of a migrant mother, it explores how motherhood is transformed when lived between countries, cultures, and symbolic worlds. Rather than understanding migration only as loss, rupture, or exile, the essay approaches migrant motherhood as a creative and ethical practice through which home, identity, and belonging are continuously reconstructed. Drawing on feminist philosophy, ethics of care, phenomenology, and postcolonial thought, the essay brings personal experience into dialogue with broader philosophical questions about embodiment, vulnerability, translation, and world-making. It argues that the migrant mother is not only a vulnerable or displaced subject, but also a translator of memory, a creator of belonging, and a maker of worlds. Through everyday acts of care, language, narration, and cultural transmission, migrant motherhood emerges as a philosophical space in which home is not simply inherited, but made and remade across borders.
Downloads
References
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. U of Chicago P, 1958.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, 1951.
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Originally published 1949.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Verso, 2009.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.
Gedalof, Irene. “Birth, Belonging and Migrant Mothers: Narratives of Reproduction in Feminist Migration Studies.” Feminist Review, vol. 93, no. 1, 2009, pp. 81–100. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2009.23.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard UP, 1982.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 222–37.
Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1991.
Reed-Sandoval, Amy. “Maternity and Migration.” Philosophy Compass, vol. 15, no. 3, 2020, article e12657. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12657.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W. W. Norton, 1976.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, U of Chicago P, 2004.
Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Translated by Kathleen Blamey, U of Chicago P, 1992.
Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Beacon Press, 1989.
Tronto, Joan C. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York UP, 2013.
Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge, 1993.
Young, Iris Marion. On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. Oxford UP, 2005.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Dr. Barbara Gabriella Renzi (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
