Placing
social reproduction at the heart of the experience of migration, this article attempts
to move beyond regulatory discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice
or ‘the Skype generation’. Following a review of feminist literature on social reproduction,
the article returns to research with Irish women migrants and non-migrants in
the 1990s to demonstrate how technologically mediated ‘time-space compression’ and
its promise of transnational proximity actually gave rise to the experience of gendered
‘time-space expansion’. The Irish Times’ ‘Generation
Emigration’ (GE) project is then introduced as a site in which similar gendered
dynamics emerge as contemporary technologically mediated connections between
emigrants and the homeland are celebrated through a compensatory
(trans)nationalist discourse that competes with but also compensates for
framings of emigration as national tragedy. The article suggests that
discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice, or new globalised
practice serve to bring emigration into being in circumscribed ways and to produce
emigrants as particular kinds of ‘recognisable’ subjects. It asks how the work
of social reproduction in the context of emigration might be posed anew in ways
that challenge dominant assumptions regarding the location and composition of
the population to be reproduced. By moving beyond these regulatory discourses
of emigration, and by emphasising the dynamics of technologically mediated
transnational social reproduction, the article identifies the racialised
heteronormative assumptions that intersect with national and global projects of
economic production and social reproduction to produce uneven gendered effects.