The Intimate Lives of Left-Behind Young Adults in the Philippines: Social Media, Gendered Intimacies, and Transnational Parenting

Abstract

Familial and intimate relationships at a distance are reconstituted in a multitude of ways, as the proliferation of social media and communication technologies afford the scaling up of privacy and publicness, also blurring the lines between presence and absence in transnational space. Based on a longitudinal and mixed method research on the impact of migration on Filipino left-behind young adult children (n = 28) and their carers (n = 28), we seek to examine the mediation of transnational parenting and how it shapes the ways left-behind sons and daughters (aged 17-19 years old) navigate heteronormative ideals of marriage and familyhood.