Recent feminist scholarship has extensively used various spatial terminologies. These terminologies as metaphors visualize or describe the way women are positioned in power relations. In this paper, questioning whether those spatial languages are usef...
Recent feminist scholarship has extensively used various spatial terminologies. These terminologies as metaphors visualize or describe the way women are positioned in power relations. In this paper, questioning whether those spatial languages are useful only in a metaphorical sense, I argue that spatialities are not only useful as metaphors, but also actually utilized by the women in question for their micro-politics. Drawing on the feminist migration literature, I explore how spatial concepts can advance understanding of migrant women and help theorize them. Migrant women as reproductive labors, called as servants of globalization by Parreñas, are gendered subalterns in this globalizing era. In spite of their transnational mobility, they face multi-layered oppressions. They, however, negotiate their dislocations by constructing transnational social fields or alternative scales. This paper reviews several spatial concepts essential to migration research-scale, place, border, and mobility. Then, it examinestwo widely known frameworks that theorize migrant women from spatial perspectives-the gendered geographies of power' addressed by Mahler and Pessar and dislocations by Parreñas. Also, further applicability to other types of migrants, such as marriage migrants, is explored.