Biopolitics of Social Reproduction and Care within Transnational Migration. The Case of Expatriate Women in Luxembourg

This submission draws on the results of my PhD dissertation in political and cultural geography that aims at unveiling embodied experiences of globalisation of expatriate women from an ethnographical case study located in Luxembourg. By focusing on the everyday place-making process during this international mobility experience, my doctoral work contributes to highlight how female expatriates produce themselves and are produced in place as transnational elite and cosmopolitan citizens of our globalised world. It draws from a fleshy feminism perspective placing the body as primary space of analysis of a large range of socio-spatial practices. In this proposed Paper, I intend to focus more specifically on the role of expatriate women in the reproduction and spread of heteronormativity at different scales. I define heteronormativity as an intersection of localised privileges (gender, sexuality, race, class,…) that could be considered as a mode of governance supporting cultural and social reproduction. I will therefore focus on the role of expatriate mothers reviewed in my thesis as cultural reproducers of the family. I plan, firstly, to describe the large variety of heteronormative practices of care daily performed by encountered mothers in this context. Secondly, I will shed light on how spouses take over care work as a lever for social mobility within postcolonial power geometries. This will finally help to open up scales of biopolitics by revealing how transnational circulation of care within different types of migration sustains and maintains a global household across space and time.