Renegotiating female transnational identities after Brexit: the importance of hybrid habitus

Transnational European migrants develop identity trajectories and a sense of belonging in a country other than their own and constantly renegotiate them. We analyse this by adapting Bourdieu’s notion of habitus to include hybrid habitus or how cultural forms of capital are embedded in a new context in homemaking practices. This renegotiation is particularly the case for EU professional migrants for whom class, gender, and nationality are interleaved in complex ways. In this paper, two women’s experiences are chosen out of a larger qualitative study of 58 professional and educated EU citizens to illustrate these ideas among Dutch transnational migrants in Scotland and British migrants in the Netherlands. We consider the complex processes in which they have developed ideas of home and belonging and how this shifted during the Brexit process as these identity trajectories were recast.