The Emotional (Un)making of the Family in Cross-European Parent–Child Relations

Abstract

This essay examines the emotions that make and unmake transnational families, drawing on interviews with migrant parents living in Scotland and separated from their children abroad. First, it explores the meaning of distance and its role in stimulating emotional connections and disconnections between family members. It emphasises the significance of separation for emotional well-being and the necessity of absences in stimulating different intensities of transnational emotional labour. Second, the essay broadens the conceptualisation of the ‘emotional’ to include emotional work and emotional worklessness. It highlights emotions of ‘longing’ and ‘hope’ that unwork the structures of intentionality and reveal passivity at the heart of familial relations. Emotional lives of transnational families are permeated by the imaginaries of co-presence and potential future. Exploring the simultaneous production and fragmentation of emotional connections, the essay suggests the reworking of the contestable family idea(l)s and attending to intimate practices beyond utility and familial normativities.