1) Bibliographic data
Mahler, Sarah J. and Patricia R. Pessar (2001) “Gendered Geographies of Power: Analyzing Gender Across Transnational Spaces.”(introduction to a symposium) Identities, V. 7-4, Jan.:441-59

2) Question(s) addressed by the author and working arguments
Interrogate the role of gender in the process of creation, transformation, and also fortification of transnational social spaces.
People do “gender-work,” using practices and discourses to negotiate relationships, notions of “masculinity” and “femininity,” and conflicting interests. People are socialized to view gender distinctions –as for example in the definition of male and female tasks- as natural, inevitable, and immutable. Gender is not the sole axis around which power and privilege revolve; differentiation based on race, ethnicity, class, nationality and other identities also play roles, often with conjunction of gender.
As with gender, our use of the term “transnational” must be defined as well as its application to different special qualifiers, such as “social field” and “context.” “Transnational” and “transnationalism” have been used and abused in such a wide variety of ways that some have bemoaned the likelihood that it will become an “empty conceptual vessel.”
Whereas global processes are largely decentred from specific national territories and take place in a global space, transnational processes are anchored in and transcend one ore more nation-states.
Glick Shiller asserts: “I employ the word transnational to discuss political, economic, social, and cultural processes that extend beyond the borders of a particular state, include actors that are not states, but are shaped by the policies and institutional practices of the states.” Some authors have characterized the linkages immigrants build as “social fields” wherein people “take actions, make decisions, feel concerns, and develop identities within social networks that connect them to two or more societies simultaneously.”
We find that transnational actions, through often associated with the erosion of the nation-state, can indeed fortify it and in so doing also reaffirm asymmetrical gender relations. Gender continues to an area sorely in need of greater attention and theorization in the transnational literature.

3) Conceptual reference to transnational – transnationalism
Transnational social spaces, transnational, transnationalism, transnational processes and transnational actions, transnational literature.

4) Conclusions or Final Remarks
The challenge is to see people’s everyday actions as a form of cultural politics embedded in specific power contexts.