This presentation examines the role of rhetoric in shaping national and transnational geographies of gender and families. Ethnographic data draws on observations, interviews, digital and printed media interviews with diplomats and highly mobile academics and their families from Latvia, Europe. I argue that mobility discourses are fundamental to modern modes of nation-creation, and I demonstrate how much effort families and professionals invest into fine-tuning their rhetoric of the role of their mobilities. Notably, the media has heightened interest in the lives of these professionals. In the meantime, mobile professionals, who are also family people, occupy specific positions nationally and transnationally due to their (legal or symbolic) duties towards a nation and the nature of their work, stipulating regular relocation to different countries. I argue that these mobile workers, together with the media, co-produce new (trans)national geographies of gender and families, which impact both migrants and non-migrants alike. The key is rhetoric which mobile workers and media use: they argue for and against, persuade and justify certain family togetherness or separation patterns for the needs of the nation.
Therefore, through this analysis, I present two main contributions to the current research. Firstly, I extend current theories of the production of nation by introducing rhetoric as a crucial practice that precedes and accompanies decision-making and distribution of gendered labour in transnational families. Secondly, it illuminates how mobile professionals and media not only reinforce particular hierarchies of (trans)national imaginaries of gender and families but also challenge the perceived privilege of mobile professionals and bring to the fore a question of gendered geographies of power.
