Transnational Health Promotion: Social well-being across borders and immigrant women’s subjectivities

In this article, the authors use two qualitative studies to address transnationalism in the intersection of migration, gender and health promotion studies. The experiences of women who have recently (less than 3 years ago) immigrated to Canada are examined focusing on their transnational health promotion activities. Despite the invisibility of women’s unpaid work in transnational and migration studies, we argue that the well-being of families, communities and nations is currently being produced in local, national, and international networks of health promotion and care giving and by the wealth generated by women’s labour. Our contribution is to bring together gendered health promotion and transnationalism and to approach such topic empirically. In particular, we advance the notion of construction of subjectivities within transnational experiences. Subsequently, our analysis focuses on three elements that inform transnational health promotion from immigrant women’s perspectives: expecting to live in a “better” place, giving and receiving care across borders, and women as transnational health promoters.