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This article offers an introduction to the essays in the theme issue, an overview of the reasons behind the recent resurgence of interest in transnationalist phenomena and a consideration of what the term means. Its places the topic in the different fields of international, world, regional, local and national history. The essay argues that transnationalism is best understood not as fostering bounded networks, but as creating honeycombs, a structure that sustains and gives shapes to the identities of nation-states, international and local institutions, and particular social and geographic spaces. A honeycomb binds, but it also contains hollowed-out spaces where organisations, individuals and ideas can wither away to be replaced by new groups, people and innovations.

This chapter examines transnationalism in migration studies. First, we investigate the initial conceptualizations of the transnational perspective on migration and efforts at systematization. Second, we evaluate the discussions around contentious issues regarding past vs. present transnationalism, the extent of transnationalism among migrants, and transnationalism, globalization, states and politics. We outline a typology of transnationalism in which transnational social spaces are differentiated according to the internal characteristics of group organization and the extent of common or shared values and symbols. Third, we examine methodological notes on transnational research where we assess the term transnationality. We identify multiple research techniques used in transnational studies and conclude that nowadays mixed methods research is on the rise. Finally, we offer some venues for further research through a transnational optic where the focus should be on changing boundaries as social spaces are composed of dynamic processes.

This article identifies and analyses links between conceptualisations of trans-gender and trans-national, and aims for a critical redefinition of political agency. Through an examination of theories on transing, passing and performativity in queer-, trans- and transnational feminist knowledge production—illustrated by discursive examples from transgender communities and Romanian migrant communities—I call for a conceptualisation of entangled power relations that does not rely on fixed, pre-established categories, but defines subjectivity through risk in political struggle. I suggest that 'transing' the nation and 'transing' gender could be thought as critical moves for a radical deconstruction of gendered and national belonging. Rather than provide a static definition of the term 'transnationalism', the article explores potentials and limits of going beyond 'the national' and 'gender', and intervenes in forms of minority nationalism that reproduce racism, sexism, heteronormativity and gender binary as the norm of Western national belonging. In particular, building on Jasbir Puar's (2007) conceptualisation of homonationalism, the article shows how forms of nationalism in Western transgender and migrant communities rely on a combination of heteronormative binary gendering and the exertion of racism. While a conventionalised approach to transnationalism defines the term as a political strategy based on transnational politics, I play with suggesting different dimensions of transnationalism: it could mean 'transgender nationalism'; the 'assimilation of transgendered persons to the Western nation'; or 'cross-border-nationalism', a form of nationalism often established in migrant communities that constructs the diaspora as a nationalist extension of the homeland. My focus, therefore, is on analysing privilegings, contradictions and ambivalences in gendering, racialising and nationalising ascriptions of (non)belonging. Overall, and as an alternative to romanticised knowledge productions of crossing national and gendered borders, I suggest a power-sensitive epistemological and methodological shift in thinking entangled power relations, belonging and subjectivity in transnational feminist knowledge productions.