Who Goes? Failures of Marital Provisioning and Women’s Agency among Less Skilled Emigrant Women Workers from Kerala

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.