Abstract:
Unlike Sri Lanka, the Philippines or Indonesia, the major
structuring contexts of international migration from Kerala / India do
not enable the mobility of less skilled women workers, yet it has been
observed that they are a prominent presence in some Middle Eastern
destinations. Legal provisions designed by the Indian state apparently
to protect less skilled women raise the barriers to their movement. There
are also cultural restrictions as overseas mobility removes women workers
from the everyday regulatory scope of local / family patriarchy.
Autonomous migration by less skilled women defies the gender norm in
Kerala which mandates marital control over women’s sexuality. These
factors render the agency of emigrant women workers oppositional, at
once defiant and compromised. Recent work suggests that women
migrate as domestic workers when there is a compelling need by flouting
state regulation through easily accessible parallel channels. But in a
cultural milieu that is hostile to women’s autonomous migration, it is
important to ask how less skilled women overcome cultural barriers at
home i.e., who goes and what negotiations underpin their movement?
The women whose narratives I analyze here turned to overseas work to
improve their lives; but they emphasize the failure of marriage to provide
a livelihood as the condition that shaped their decision to migrate. This
paper draws upon a selection of narratives from interviews with over
150 less skilled emigrant and returnee women workers from Trivandrum
district to argue that the conditions that structure international migration
from Kerala marginalises women, narrowing the material base from which
aspiring migrants are drawn and rendering their agency suspect but
emigrant women maneuver local and family patriarchy by foregrounding
the failure of marital provisioning and create the space to go.
