Diasporic gender and communication

This article analyses the peculiarities of the relation between three concepts: ‘diaspora’, ‘gender’ and ‘communication’ in the case of women of Romanian ethnic origin living in Canada. Diasporas and diasporic experiences, even in their apparently more traditionalist variants, should not be dismissed simplistically as backward-looking, as they are almost invariably constituting new transnational spaces of experience that are complexly interfacing with the experiential frameworks that both countries of settlement and purported countries of origin represent. Diasporas are located in the midst of diverse circulations. Borrowing Appadurai’s notions (1996), it can be argued that ‘diaspora is the intersection point of ethno-scapes, finance-scapes, ideo-scapes, techno-scapes and media-scapes’ (1996). The article assumes that the interaction between gender, social identity and communication can be a new way of understanding the peculiarities of diaspora in the modern age. The article favours a qualitative research methodology. On the basis of ‘methods’ triangulation’ principle and for validity reasons, two main methods of data collection will be used: the discourse analysis of the online journals (blogs) written by Romanian women and the semi-structured interviews with a sample of Romanian women from the Canadian diaspora. Communication, either as ‘a bridge to homeland’, or as ‘a link between the diaspora communities in local, national and transnational levels’ is contributing to the creation of symbolic community spaces in which identities can be reconstructed.