Périnatalité et parcours de vie de femmes sud-asiatiques récemment immigrées à Montréal

In the last few years in Quebec, the number of children from mothers born outside of Canada has outpaced the number of children from mothers born in Canada. While pregnancy results in a lot of significant changes for all mothers, those changes can be exacerbated when the pregnancy is combined with the migratory experience. Although existing research has already documented some of the challenges experienced by immigrant women during their perinatal period, there has been no research on South Asian women living in Quebec. Thus, this thesis aims at documenting life courses of South Asian pregnant women recently immigrated in Montreal. More specifically, this project will focus on questions of identity for the women interviewed, their respective socialization, their projects, and their immigration paths and experiences.  The data was collected using a qualitative methodological approach. It is primarily based on 25 biographical narratives of the perinatal period of South Asian women. These women are pregnant or have recently given birth, have emigrated for less than 10 years and are living in the Parc-Extension district of Montreal, a place where many South Asian immigrants settle in Quebec. In addition, secondary data includes 14 interviews of South Asian women who have immigrated to Quebec more than 10 years ago or who have already given birth in their countries of origin. All the data was compiled during a 13 months ethnographic fieldwork and during observation activities within community centers, health care facilities, and respondent’s homes.   The project will first examine the research context, i.e. introduce the reader to the interpretative referents, define the research methodology and contextualize the fieldwork. The results’ analyses will be presented in the following 3 chapters. Given the complexity and heterogeneity of respondents’ life courses, a typology of the migratory trajectories was devised based on issues that are tied to the perinatal period. Those trajectories reveal both the commonality and the difference of each case. Given the transformations of the support network mobilized during the perinatal period (inclusion of the husbands who is traditionally excluded and transnational family networks) and the new forms of interactions involved, the project will discuss the new ways South Asian women choose to bend social norms to cope with the perinatal period in a migratory context. Among other things, the project will identify closer ties between husbands and wives and the increased flexibility regarding reproductive and gender norms that typically rule in the contexts of origins.   Finally, the project will explore the reproductive strategies devised during perinatal periods to deal with the vicissitudes of migratory trajectories and to address social networks reconfigurations, in which the redefinitions of gender and kinship norms are often asserted without necessarily meaning a radical rupture with pre-migration social identities. These strategies will be examined in the context of pregnancy planning, in relation to how childbirth experience is being re-appropriated, particularly in the case of the husband participation in the delivery.

Keyphrases: immigration, perinatal period, South Asian women, social networks, identity, life courses, migration trajectory, Montreal Parc extension, Canada, South Asia