Transnational lives. Transnational bodies? An introduction

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, both “the body” and “transnationalism” have been elaborated as sociological terms, empirically investigated as research topics, and finally established within the social-scientific discourses as the so called “turns” (see Gugutzer, 2006; Levitt & Nyberg-Sørensen, 2004). Although there is an increasing interest in the social role of the body, and the transnational paradigm has established itself as a new point of reference for migratory movements, both “turns” are brought together only very rarely. Speaking about the body within the social sciences means speaking from the perspective of the embodied actor; an actor whose knowledge, practices, and sensations are carnal; one who is situated in a specific presence at a certain place, one who is affected by and affecting the local surroundings. Considering common definitions of transnationalism, it is always highlighted that the local surrounding may become hybridized through transnational linkages and (re-) presentations of distant others and remote events. Within a general definition that describes transnationalism as a circulation of goods, people, and information, which leads to a relatively stable mesh that stretches across national borders and manifests itself within different localities (e.g. Pries, 2008, p. 4), the bodily and finite matter of those people living transnationally and its impacts on transnational lifeworlds seems to be comparatively weightless – be it only that it is taken for granted. The TSR Special Issue “Transnational Lives. Transnational Bodies?” asks: in what way do transnational lives result in transnational bodies? While common definitions of transnationalism stress the cross-linkages between different localities, people, and communities that are queering national borders, the fact that actors are emplaced by their bodies means that the body becomes something to manage and mediate with a quality of its own. At the same time, it is the physical weight and the matter of the local body that demands actual or virtual movement. One of the first attempts to conceptualize transnationalism as an embodied phenomenon was made by Kevin Dunn in 2010. Dunn states that the body has always been present in migration research – be it only “by the movement of people across space” – but it has not been “a prominent spatial scale of analysis in the field” (Dunn, 2010, p. 1). Following Dunn’s path of argumentation, we hypothesize that transnational lifeworlds and lives not only need to be embodied and locally embedded in order to become a social reality, but that the body itself makes demands by its very own quality and thus already can be considered as a trans-bordered phenomenon. Bodies do not simply exist as bodies per se but they are materializing and symbolizing socio-political categories and constructions: they are