Introduction

The article investigates the relationship between female mobility and the role of women in the (re)building of homes across national borders. The aim is to understand how such mobility builds transnational or cross-border homes, what these homes are like, and how women live in these spaces.

To answer these questions, a review of English-, Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking social sciences studies on home, gender and borders was developed. A total of 92 publications that address social processes that have emerged since the late twentieth century, mainly in the field of feminist and gender studies, were analyzed. Taken together, these works provide an overview of the interpellation of discussions concerning migration and female mobility (transnational or cross-border) and the concept of home.

To this end, the intersectionality of inequalities marked by gender, class, racial labels and nationality and their contribution to the spatialization of experience within and between borders was analyzed. Migration is assumed to be strategic social phenomenon that provides insight into social reproduction and the family (^{Herrera, 2012}), because it allows these processes to be observed as spatial realities.

The next section begins by explaining the concepts that constitute the analytical framework of the article and that guide the reading of the other sections. In the second section, a conceptualization and contextualization of the phenomenon of international female migration is carried out. Third, the concept of transnational and cross-border households is discussed. The study concludes with some reflections on what was analyzed.

Analytical keys

Five analytical-empirical definitions guide the interpretative framework of the discussion proposed in this text. Let us pause for a moment to explain them. First, in agreement with ^{Piscitelli et al. (2011, p. 9)}, it is assumed that mobility(ies) is a more “fertile”, flexible and dynamic concept than migration(s), offering greater possibilities for encompassing the different types of movements that women can lead and their changes in time and space. However, throughout the text, both concepts ─migrations and mobilities─ are used to engage with the preferences of different authors.¹

Second, the discussion is based on the premise that all knowledge and social processes are situated (^{Rose, 1997}). This implies the assumption that place is more than a simple reference point for the migratory or mobility process; rather, it is constitutive and constituent of both (^{Silvey, 2006, p. 71}).² In addition, it is assumed that the migratory or mobility experience builds places and homes. The conducted review yielded definitions of and coinciding reflections on both place and home in the literature on human displacement. Thus, although they represent different and specific concepts, the two terms are treated as equivalent and in some works and are juxtaposed in others, which regard the home as a special type of place (^{Easthope, 2004, p. 135}). Given the limits of the article, it is not the objective of this text to differentiate between the two. Instead, the focus is on a discussion of the concept of home and relating it to current transnational and cross-border women’s movements.

Third, globalization ─new information and transport technologies that have become increasingly widespread since the late twentieth century─ has led to profound changes in international migrations and mobility by diversifying realities, increasing complexities and promoting constant negotiation in sociospatial processes (^{Herrera-Lima & Pries, 2006, p. 528}). Time-space compression, a characteristic of globalization, has generated uncertainties about the experiences, feelings and representations of places (^{Massey, 1991, p. 177}). In this debate, it becomes necessary to theorize places and homes to centralize the “geographical stretching-out of social relations” (^{Massey, 1991, p. 178}) and its impacts on our experience of space and place.

Fourth, in the early 1990s, upon assuming the previously described analytical imperative, authors such as Nina ^{Glick-Schiller (1999)} and Peggy ^{Levitt (1998}) questioned the limitations and scope of the assimilationist paradigm of international migration studies. This paradigm affirmed the inevitability of migrant acculturation processes in destination societies. Additionally, this paradigm reproduced visions of the social phenomena and methodologies that circumscribed the entire analysis by the borders of the nation-state, with an incursion into “methodological nationalisms” (^{Wimmer & Glick-Schiller, 2002}, ²⁰⁰³). Based on the perception that migrants maintain ties with their territories of origin ─family, social, economic, political, religious relations─ Glick-Schiller and other authors proposed the concept of “transnationalism”, which establishes a new paradigm for explaining international migration (^{Glick-Schiller, 1999}; ^{Levitt, 1998}). According to this line of thinking, migrants and migratory networks build and settle in “transnational social fields”³ (^{Glick-Schiller, 1999}).

In the global North and South, this perspective became the main analytical tool for understanding the migratory phenomena that overflow national borders and establish ties and relationships between different localities (^{Guizardi et al., 2017, p. 24}). The growing academic interest in transnationalism, as well as transnational female migration, inspired the “second generation of migratory studies” (^{Domenech & Pereira, 2017}, p. 88).⁴ In these controversial debates, women ─who have historically been invisible in studies on the subject, reduced to their partner’s passive companions─ become recognized as protagonists of individual, family and community migration endeavors (^{Camacho, 2010}, p. 35). Thus, to accompany these debates, in this article, gender is considered a fundamental category of analysis for the study of sociospatial phenomena and for understanding female experiences of migration and mobility. As migrant women are the main supporters of households ─both transnational and cross-border households─ their mobility creates a series of complexities in the maintenance of a domestic space and family relationships (^{Diatlova, 2017, p. 62}). The gender perspective applied to these processes allows the actions of the actors to be questioned and brings to light many spaces that are not usually considered (such as the domestic space). Additionally, it allows an examination of the social and power relations that are usually unseen in hegemonic and androcentric analytical frameworks.

Fifth, transnational migration does not represent all of the mobility processes that are in effect across borders. It is also necessary to consider cross-border migrations and mobility. The debate that distinguishes transnational and cross-border mobility is a recent development in migratory studies. Although transnational theory serves as an epistemological and methodological basis for cross-border studies (^{Garduño, 2003}; ^{Guizardi, Valdebenito et al., 2018}), border mobilities have particularities that are not contemplated by the concept of transnationalism.

The global securitization of migration policies since 2001⁵ has led to new patterns of mobility, which has re-established the leading role of border areas. Since 2010, families and communities that move around and live in the border areas have been referred to as “cross-border”, based on the understanding that “border crossings articulate transnational social fields between origin and host societies, differently than what is observed with long-distance migrant networks” (^{Guizardi, Valdebenito et al., 2018, p. 149}).

According to Stephen (2012), the main differences between transnational and cross-border mobility patterns are a) the historical and current complexities of border areas; b) the radicalization of simultaneity⁶ between national spaces; and c) the various border crossings ─literal or otherwise─ that individuals make in this space (Stephen, 2012, p. 473, cited in ^{Guizardi, Valdebenito et al., 2018}, p. 155). Similarly, cross-border families and households differ empirically from what authors described from the transnational perspective (^{Guizardi, Valdebenito et al., 2018, p. 158}).

Beyond these particularities, the intensification of transnational and cross-border female mobility caused a series of challenges for scientific research. First, it urged the questioning of some traditional concepts of the social sciences, such as space, place, home, family and marriage. Second, it involved a review of the epistemological and methodological models conventionally used, which stimulated the search for new analytical tools that more effectively cover contemporary phenomena. The present text is part of these efforts.

The feminization of migration

The phenomenon called the “feminization of migration” (^{Martínez-Pizarro, 2003}; ^{Sassen, 2003}) consists of the progressive incorporation of women into migration flows and the change in their position within them: from companions to protagonists of their own projects, oriented towards maintaining family subsistence (^{Camacho, 2010}, p. 46). Female migration is not a new phenomenon, but globalization transformed it, giving it a new “transcontinental” configuration (^{Herrera & Sørensen, 2017}, p. 16).⁷

Since the 1960s, there has been a sustained increase in the number of international migrant women. Starting in the 1990s, women were the majority among migrant groups from several countries in developed regions and in Latin America (^{Martínez-Pizarro, 2003, p. 20}). However, from 2000 to 2020, this trend towards feminization diminished: currently, women constitute 47.9% of the global migrant population (^{Organización Internacional de la Migración [OIM], 2020}). This recent increase in male participation is conditioned by the gender imbalance in migrations from regions such as South Asia (6 000 000 men versus 1 300 000 women) and the Arab states (19 100 000 men versus 3 600 000 women) (^{OIM, 2020, p. 37}). In Latin America, the last intercensal period ─between 2000 and 2010─ continued to show a feminized pattern of intraregional migration, with a slight decline of 93 to 95 men per 100 women in 16 of its 20 countries (^{Martínez-Pizarro & Orrego, 2016, p. 18}).

This feminization represents asymmetric and particular migratory experiences conditioned by gender as an element that “structurally covers the decisions, trajectories and consequences of migration” (^{Martínez-Pizarro, 2003, p. 8}). The increase in the participation of women in international migration flows is the result of neoliberal economic transformations that alter and increase the precariousness of working conditions for workers in both the North and the global South (^{Camacho, 2010}; ^{Datta et al., 2010}; ^{Herrera & Sørensen, 2017}; ^{Mora, 2008}). The processes of outsourcing, labor flexibility and social security reduction have pressured ─at the same time as they made possible─ the entry of women into the labor market and their contribution to family income (^{Camacho, 2010}; ^{Datta et al., 2010}; ^{Mills, 2003}).

In the South, this process was accompanied by the breakdown of families and the abandonment of the home by men in the most impoverished and middle social sectors, which led to female role overload in terms of productive and reproductive work within families (^{Guizardi, González et al., 2018}; ^{Guizardi, Valdebenito et al., 2018}). In the North, a “care crisis” is observed (^{Acosta, 2015}; ^{Guizardi, González et al. 2018}; ^{Hochschild, 2002}), characterized by a lack of people to maintain activities of social reproduction. This phenomenon is caused by the inclusion of women in the productive labor market (^{Guizardi, González et al., 2018}), the increase in life expectancy, the absence of a full redistribution of the work of reproduction between men and women and the constant reduction of the social welfare state in these countries (^{Herrera & Sørensen, 2017}).

This crisis caused the “flight of care” (^{Acosta, 2015}; ^{Bettio et al., 2006}; ^{Herrera, 2012}) via the internationalization of paid care. Women from the South migrate to the global North to meet the demands for domestic workers and provide care for the central capitalist countries. According to ^{Acosta (2015, pp. 25-26)}, in this model, “the female and flexible workforce (usually immigrant, indigenous and Afro-descendant women) replaces the unpaid domestic work and care that women did in the developed countries”. Care work is thus the main occupation of Latin American migrant women (^{Herrera, 2012}).

Exceeding an international circuit, this model forms a “global care chain” (^{Hochschild, 2001}) in which women serve as “substitutes” for other women in home care. The concept of global care chains has prompted important reflections and debates in migratory studies. These chains constitute “a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring” (^{Hochschild 2001}). ^{Yeates (2012}) defines them as follows:

By migrating to take up paid domestic labour the migrant woman finds herself unable to discharge her own ‘domestic duties’ because she is geographically distant from her children and her home, creating a need for someone else to do so. That person ―often another woman― is drawn from an even poorer household in the sending country or she may be a member of the migrant woman’s own family. As we go ‘down’ the chain the value ascribed to the labour decreases and often becomes unpaid at the end of the chain, where an older daughter may substitute for her mother in providing unpaid care for her younger siblings. (^{Yeates, 2012}, p. 137)

In this network, care is extracted as a resource and transferred from poor countries to rich countries (^{Yeates, 2012}, p. 137). ^{Herrera (2012, pp. 41-42}) considers that the concept is useful for explaining and demonstrating the unequal macrostructures of international female migration in recent decades. For women from the global South to be able to exercise these productive functions, they must outsource the face-to-face care of their own home and their sons and daughters to women in their family networks ─mothers, sisters or daughters (^{Assis, 2007}; ^{Datta et al., 2010}; ^{Gonzálvez, 2013}; ^{Herrera & Sørensen, 2017}).

Moreover, household care is not tacitly replaced or abandoned by migrant women. They provide it from a distance. This implies a high female role overload through the reconciliation of care between different and distant spatialities (^{Gregorio Gil & Gonzálvez, 2012}; ^{Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2000}). According to ^{Herrera (2012}, p. 41), “if capitalism has always rested on a sexual division in which women, with their reproductive work, subsidize the economy, global care chains express this process on a transnational scale”. This complicates the exercise of social reproduction.

The concept of social reproduction, according to feminist theory, refers to “activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis, and intergenerationally” (^{Laslett & Brenner, 1989, p. 382}). It includes mental, physical and emotional work, and care is a necessary element for the maintenance of current and future generations (^{Laslett & Brenner, 1989, p. 383}). It is important to discuss the concept of “care” and its centrality to social reproduction. Care refers to physical and emotional work based on the fulfillment of the needs and interests of another or others, within or outside one’s family, with the aim of providing for their physical, mental and emotional well-being (^{Datta et al., 2010}; ^{Gilligan, 1982}; ^{Gonzálvez, 2013}; ^{Milligan & Wiles, 2010}). It can be paid or free, performed inside or outside the home, within a country or among several countries (transnational care) and is fundamental for social and collective reproduction (^{Fisher & Tronto, 1990}; ^{Gonzálvez, 2013}). Similarly, care is an expression of the power relations that affect the subordinate subjects of society (in this case, women in general and migrants in particular) (^{Datta et al., 2010}).

Consequently, social reproduction is not only the biological process of procreation but includes a diversity of forms of work. In addition, feminist understanding challenges the Marxist definition of social reproduction and draws attention to the productive nature of life-maintenance tasks, which are fundamental for the perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production and its inherent class and gender inequalities (^{Laslett & Brenner, 1989}, p. 383). As the productive system is totally dependent on the reproductive system, the globalization of production is accompanied by a globalization and transnationalization of care (^{Yeates, 2012}, p. 135).

These debates gave rise to the concept of “transnational social reproduction” (^{Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001}; ^{Salazar Parreñas, 2001}), which allows us to understand the social organization of care at the global level and put “care at the center” of studies on migration (^{Herrera & Sørensen, 2017}; ^{Gonzálvez, 2013}). The “occupational segregation by sex” in patriarchal societies shapes the demand for migrant labor and pushes women into jobs related to social reproduction, disengaging men from these functions (^{Herrera, 2012, p. 40}). A “new international division of reproductive labor” is formed (^{Salazar Parreñas, 2001}) that intensifies what feminists have, since the 1970s, called the “double presence” of women (^{Balbo et al., 1978}); that is, the entry of women into productive work does not free them from reproductive work. All these concepts and reflections lead to a common denominator: they present globalization as a reconfiguration of gender inequality on a different scale, from the local to the transnational. Thus, the insertion of migrant women into the labor markets of destination countries is conditioned by multiple expressed inequalities. These inequalities constitute embodied phenomena, which are expressed in their corporealities (^{Gregorio Gil, 2009}; ^{Herrera, 2012}; ^{Piscitelli, 2012}). The body identification of migrant women from the South, through stereotypes that associate their skin color and phenotype with social marginalization, constitutes a contemporary form of racism that impacts them as, regardless of their abilities and educational training, they are inserted into the domestic services and care sector (^{Assis, 2004}, ²⁰¹¹; ^{Datta et al., 2010}; ^{Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001}; ^{Parella, 2003}; ^{Salazar Parreñas, 2001}; ^{Stefoni, 2009}) or in the sex trade (^{Gregorio Gil & Ramírez, 2000}; ^{Piscitelli, 2008}, ²⁰¹², ²⁰¹³) in the receiving countries. These insertions are mediated by informal networks coordinated in the so-called “ethnic enclaves” they live in (^{Assis, 2011, p. 322}).⁸

Social networks in countries of origin, transit and destination play a fundamental role in migration and in the reorganization of families in the transnational social field (^{Assis, 2011, p. 325}). Gender studies show that women not only use migratory networks (established by migrants and nonmigrants) but are also fundamental agents in the maintenance of these networks and their links across borders (^{Assis, 2011}; ^{Sørensen, 2008}; ^{Tapia & Ramos, 2013}).

Taken together, studies on female migration from a globalization standpoint allow us to propose that, despite the process of global economic, social and political restructuring, reproductive work continues to be the basis of productive activity, and the hegemonic gender order remains intact. Women continue to be primarily responsible for reproductive work: mothering and caring for the home, children, young people and the elderly (^{Datta et al., 2010}; ^{Mills, 2003}; ^{Sørensen & Vammen, 2016}). According to ^{Sassen (2003}), this implies that the processes of economic globalization intersect with gender inequality.

Transnational and cross-border female migration thus emerges as an option for female providers and heads of household, mainly from countries in the South, who, in the face of labor difficulties, cross borders. Paradoxically, in doing so, they further contribute to social inequalities conditioned by gender (^{Acosta, 2015}; ^{Martínez-Pizarro, 2003}; ^{Mora, 2008}; ^{Tijoux, 2007}). In a world in motion, these women continue to occupy a position of inequality (^{Assis, 2014, p. 31}). Simultaneously, migration is a dialectical phenomenon that releases people from situations of violence and inequality and represents opportunities for the construction of autonomy, agency, resistance and political action (^{Assis, 2004}; ^{Bosco et al., 2011}; ^{Herrera, 2012}; ^{Piscitelli, 2012}; ^{Wilkins, 2017}). Thus, opportunity and inequality are the two faces of a phenomenon that ^{Sassen (2001, p. 103)} calls “the feminization of survival”.

Consequently, there is a close link between the feminization of migration ─national, transnational and cross-border─ and care work. This link serves to motivate female mobility, providing the main job opportunities in destination locations and representing an extended practice among the different moments/spaces of the migration project.⁹ It operates, then, as a coordinating element for relations and territories in the context of international migration (^{Yeates, 2012}).

Beyond the impact of female migration on the lives, bodies, identities and subjectivities of these women and their closest relationships, care also transforms and produces/reproduces their own landscapes and spatialities. Women, in their mobility, reinvent ways of living. Care involves interpersonal relationships between places, which constitute a spatialized network (^{Milligan & Wiles, 2010}, pp. 737-738). Therefore, there is an urgent need to study and understand the geographies produced by a new form of transnational and cross-border living, a form of intermediate and/or simultaneous living between here and there, between the place of origin and the place of reception: the crossing of borders. These “care landscapes” are not limited to a physical territory but are a product and (re)producer of the care structures (^{Milligan & Wiles, 2010, p. 736}).¹⁰

According to ^{Milligan and Wiles (2010}, p. 736), “care and care relationships are located in, shaped by, and determine particular spaces and places that stretch from the local to the global” and can encompass the institutional, domestic, familiar, public and private and the intersections among them (^{Milligan & Wiles, 2010, p. 738}). To understand transnational care, it is necessary to study households as a social field where care practices are established (^{Gonzálvez, 2013}, p. 135). Next, we delve into the debate on the concept of home and establish its relationship with gender and transnational/cross-border mobility.

The concept of home

According to ^{Moore (2000}), the concept of home has been approached and constructed since the romantic literature of the nineteenth century. However, it was ^{Heidegger’s (1954}) interest in dwelling in the mid-twentieth century that made the home a central theme in different areas of the social and human sciences.

According to ^{Heidegger (1954}), the activity of building homes as the spaces where human beings live approaches the very nature of being: “I dwell, I am” (p. 151). To refer to this meaning, the author retrieves the old German word bauen, which means build, dwell, stay or be, and alleges that the human being is what he lives (p. 152). Being and dwelling thus have an intrinsic relationship, as do dwelling and building. Building is defined as the daily experience of creating, caring for and cultivating the space in which one lives, i.e., the home: “Building how to live, that is, being on Earth, is part of our everyday experience, as language happily says, in anticipation of the ‘usual’” (^{Heidegger, 1954, p. 152}). Dwelling, then, is a “fundamental trait of being” (^{Heidegger, 1954, p. 161}).

^{Bachelard (1964}) resizes these statements and defines the home as a welcoming and emotional place, a fundamental element of human development (^{Easthope, 2004}; ^{Moore, 2000}; ^{Pinto de Carvalho & Cornejo, 2018}). Here, the home appears as a “poetic place”; as “poetry, metaphor and experience”; and as the initial reference for one’s inscription on the world (^{Pinto de Carvalho & Cornejo, 2018, p. 8}). With Bachelard’s work, the significance of place and home creates the basis for a “philosophy of space” (^{Moore, 2000, p. 210}).

Under the influence of these philosophers, the home came to occupy a prominent place in the human geography of the 1970s (^{Easthope, 2004}; ^{Moore, 2000}). For humanist geographers, the home is the basis of identity; it is where individuals build a sense of themselves and their relationship with the world (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006}, p. 11). People’s perception of their environment and themselves is produced through their lived and imagined home experiences (^{Bonhomme, 2013}). The home, according to these geographers, is a place of intimacy, protection and creativity. It is also sacred.

For Tuan, the word home, in English, represents the place of belonging, of human development - nurturing, the center of emotions, a place of refuge and rest. This representation can move between different scales: the house, the neighborhood, the region, or the state (^{Tuan, 1971, p. 189}). It lies on the opposite side of journey; in the home-journey binary, Tuan links the home to a private and domestic environment, distinct from the public and working world.

However, the humanist idea of home suffered significant criticism from academics and feminist groups that reinterpreted the concept and made it more complex based on the visibility of other experiences of living that are practiced by subjects who are historically marginalized and excluded from social/academic analysis, such as women and LGBTQI groups (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006}). Feminism then produced a shift towards the concept and study of the domestic that incorporated gender as a critical unit for understanding the home and its multiple forms: the domestic space and its relationships are gendered, colored by gender experiences and expectations (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006, p. 16}). In this argument, the home becomes an optimal space for understanding daily relationships marked by differences and inequalities (^{Walsh, 2006, p. 126}).

From the feminist and gender perspectives, the home is not always considered the sacred and safe place that humanist geographers have proposed; it is also a place of violence, oppression, alienation and resistance. This perspective challenges the humanist vision of the home as a place of refuge from work, as well as the Marxist vision that assumes that it is a space solely focused on social reproduction, which draws attention to the unpaid work of women in the domestic field (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006}, pp. 15-16).

From a social and critical psychology perspective, ^{Pinto de Carvalho and Cornejo (2018}) recognize that the home can have a negative role in the lives of people (especially women), which contradicts the hegemonic (and exclusive) position that defines the home as a positive space. Thus, they point to the “ambivalent and negative roles” of the home, which are associated with situations such as work, violence, seclusion, lack of privacy, vulnerability, stigma or nostalgia for places that once were (Pinto Carvalho & Cornejo, 2018, pp. 13-15).

Feminism also questions the relationship between social structures and the home; it rejects the polarity between the public and private spheres and understands them as categories and articulated spaces: “What happens in, and definitions of, the domestic sphere are influenced by processes and characteristics of the public sphere, and vice versa” (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006}, p. 18). Consequently, the home is a dually public and private place where the various social and power relations merge (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006, pp. 21-27}). This leads to an assumption of the home as “intensely political” (^{Brickell, 2012, p. 227}). This approach criticizes the dichotomous reading of “small politics” (home) and “big politics” (geopolitics), highlighting the influence that one has on the other. Thus, the home is perceived as “a vital space for understanding the micro-geographies of social and spatial uncertainty which influence, and are influenced by, wider structural forces” (^{Brickell, 2012, p. 227}).

The feminist perspective indicates that the experiences and senses of the home are colored by the intersection of multiple axes of difference and power, such as racial labels, class, gender, age and nationality (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006}, pp. 18-19). Within this “power geometry”, as mentioned by ^{Massey (1991}, p. 179), people are differently located in relation to the home and experience it differently according to their “social position” (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006, pp. 24-25}). The conception of the intersectionality of these markers of inequality is used by feminism to account for the “crossed or imbricated perception of power relations” and the multiple interdependent inequalities that these relationships generate (^{Viveros, 2016, pp. 2 -5}).

People of different genders experience and signify place in different ways. Black feminism, in turn, criticizes the idea of home developed by white middle-class feminism and claims it as a space of opportunities and identity and cultural resistance due to the racialized processes of segregation that some women experience in the external space (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006}, p. 20). In theorizing about the United States, ^{Davis (2016}) argues that black women, since the era of slavery, have never been included in the “feminine ideology”, which was limited to mainly middle-class white women.¹¹ For black women, marriage, home, work, and public space are conceived in a particular way. Black women, first enslaved and later “freed”, always fulfilled the role of productive workers, working more outside the home than their white contemporaries did (^{Davis, 2016, p. 135}). Therefore, it is not possible to apply a universal notion of home to the different experiences that women embody.

Generally, when considering home as a place located in space and time, contemporary studies on this concept agree that it transcends the materiality of domestic space (^{Ahmed, 1999}; ^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006}; ^{Brickell, 2012}; ^{Moore, 2000}; ^{Morley, 2001}; ^{Easthope, 2004}). However, they consider housing a fundamental element for its understanding (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006}; ^{Diatlova, 2017}). In these debates, the home is defined as an emotional place (Massey, 2001, cited in ^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006, p. 25}), a space of belonging: “the home is where the heart is” (^{Ahmed, 1999, p 341}). ^{Easthope (2004)} considers it “particularly significant” (p. 128), a special type of place (p. 135). In short, a place has social, psychological and emotional meanings for individuals and groups (^{Easthope, 2004, p. 134}). Along these same lines, ^{Miller (2001)} states that the home is where what truly matters happens.

From viewpoint of critical geography, ^{Blunt and Dowling (2006}) consider the home as both a materiality ─a physical location─ as an imaginary loaded with “spatialized feelings”, such as belonging/attachment, desire and intimacy, but also fear, violence and alienation. The home is thus a “spatial imaginary”, according to the authors, a set of intersected and variable meanings and feelings related to a specific context that simultaneously constructs places and extends them through spaces and scales (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006, p. 2}). The material and imaginative geographies of the home are relational: their materiality depends on the perception/imagination of the home. However, this perception is influenced by its physical context (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006, p. 22}). The home is linked to physical structure(s), although it is not the physical structure(s) itself (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006, p. 10}).

The construction of the link with that special place ─the sense of home─ is constituted in action, in daily performative acts (^{Bonhomme, 2013}, p. 8) that connect being with a place. “We feel at home” in the place where habits develop (^{Easthope, 2004, p. 133}). For ^{Diatlova (2017}), care routines are fundamental for the establishment of a sense of home: we belong to the place we care for and to the place where we care and are (self-) cared for (^{Diatlova, 2017, p. 67}). The home, then, is the extension and expression of bodily routines (^{Blunt & Dowling, 2006}, p. 5), especially those of care.

According to ^{Baxter and Brickell (2014}, p. 134), building a home - homemaking - is the aim of all individuals in the process of living. Chardon, influenced by ^{Heidegger (1954}), considers that dwelling is necessarily linked to the notion of constructing a context, a living environment (^{Chardon, 2010, p. 22}). On the other hand, home deconstruction ─home unmaking─ is “the precarious process by which material and/or imaginary components of home are unintentionally or deliberately, temporarily or permanently, divested, damaged or even destroyed” (^{Baxter & Brickell, 2014, p. 134}). Home unmaking can be the result of forced evictions, war, genocide, natural disasters, and more regular life events, such as voluntarily leaving home, including migratory processes.

^{Ahmed (1999}) questions the opposition between home and distancing and considers that movement is part of the process of building the home as a complex phenomenon of living (^{Ahmed, 1999, p. 341}). For the author ─who considers herself to live in various homes─ the experience of “being-at-home” encompasses permeability and interpenetration of subject and space, rather than inhabiting an alien space that is exterior to one’s being/“I” [self] (^{Ahmed, 1999}). In this way, she understands the experience of being at home as living in a second skin:

The home as skin suggests the boundary between self and home is permeable, but also that the boundary between home and away is permeable as well. Here, movement away is also movement within the constitution of home as such. That is, movement away is always affective: it affects how ‘homely’ one might feel and fail to feel. (^{Ahmed, 1999, p. 341})

Massey, in turn, challenges the notion of home as something fixed and delimited, regarding it as comprising open nodal points built by networks and social relations (^{Massey, 1991}). Consequently, the home is not a thing ─static, permanent─ but rather a collection of processes and social relations. Places and homes do not have borders, although borders are necessary for the conceptualization of the place itself (^{Massey, 1991, p. 184}). This (in)definite concept is very well aligned with the current transnational and cross-border perspective of deterritorialized/reterritorialized households, which we will discuss next.¹²

Migration and new spatialities

Final thoughts

The present work carried out a theoretical analysis on the construction of transnational and cross-border homes by associating them with international female migration. From this review, it is concluded, first, that the experience of migration and living are conditioned by major economic, social, cultural and political processes. The migration of female heads of household is part of a macrostructural process of global inequalities (including gender inequalities) that are reproduced due to female responsibility for the work of social reproduction. This inequality is permeated by hierarchies and by power relations and domination (^{Herrera, 2012}).

Second, it is concluded that migration/mobility, border and gender are important analytical frameworks for revealing the structural inequalities that accompany and constitute individuals who are spatialized in their ways of being, living and belonging (^{Heidegger, 1954}).

Third, transnational and cross-border households act as a spatial and imagined representation of these intersecting inequalities, marked mainly by sexism, racism and nationalism. These structures determine which bodies belong where and how different social groups subjectively experience spatialities (^{Silvey, 2006}, p. 70). Thus, mobility and living are not homogeneous. One’s social placement in the world allows and limits mobility, displacements, belongings and the possibilities of living in certain geographies and not others.

Fourth, feminist and transnational perspectives have made a valiant contribution to the international debate by stressing the rigidity of theories and concepts by interweaving and recognizing a variety of spatialities, experiences and actors that orbit the “transnational social field” (^{Glick-Schiller, 1999}). From the transnational perspective, long-distance living is made visible through the maintenance and development of ties and relationships between the territories of origin and destination through a female-dominated social network. Thus, new concepts arise with which to analyze the family, marriage, motherhood and the transnational home.

Fifth, transnationalism laid the foundations for contemporary studies to reinterpret global movements around border areas. The ideal of globalization as freedom of movement met obstacles in the policies of securitization that have been adopted worldwide, especially by countries of the global North, since the beginning of the 21st century. Borders have gained centrality, and people have sought to reinvent possible cross-border movements. Thus, new and old mobilities have challenged another view, and cross-border studies seek to meet that challenge through their progress in showing the particularity of living near borders.

Sixth, the conceptual differences between the transnational household and the cross-border household are established. The latter challenges the notion of distance from the transnational home. Both are homes ─material, imaginative, and emotional─ established simultaneously between nations. However, transnational households are supposedly linked through a long material distance, measured in kilometers, hours, days or other units of measurement. Cross-border homes are built from shorter material distances, which can mean greater physical contact between families and households. On this topic, this work coincides with ^{Guizardi, Valdebenito et al. (2018}) in that the cross-border home is also transnational. However, it is not a two-way street: the transnational home is not cross-border since the border areas build particular social fields. There are many ways to live in this ambivalent, asymmetric and transitional space called the border.

Seventh, living at the border is marked by violence, inequality and continuous conflict with the state. It is always mediated by state presence, which regulates and controls the trajectories and geographies of living by increasing historical processes of inequality. This intervention has a particular impact on the female experience as the “other gender”. Simultaneously, the cross-border home empowers women to challenge imposed patriarchal patterns and inhabit the historically masculinized public space. In the experiences of border living, women have the opportunity to build political subjectivity. Thus, the border constitutes an ambivalent place of inequality and opportunity, marked by movement and intersectionality.

Finally, the burden of cumulative productive and reproductive work falls exclusively on women in their daily work of caring across territories in transnational and cross-border homes. Despite the robustness of academic production on international migrations (and particularly in Latin America), the relationship between cross-border households and gender inequalities of women who cross borders is yet to be explored. This research agenda is urgently needed, and the attention of researchers from the different fields of the social sciences should be mobilized, particularly in light of the complex COVID-19 pandemic landscape, which will impact the work and care regimes of women at the border.