The Entanglements of Migration and Marriage: Negotiating Mobility Projects among Young Indonesian Women from Migrant-sending Villages

ABSTRACT

In Indonesian society, both ‘migration’ and ‘marriage’ are important social markers that signify transition to adulthood. This paper examines how young Indonesian women reconcile labour migration aspirations with hegemonic constructions of marriage and gendered household roles, where women are depicted as household ‘managers’ subordinate to their husbands who are the ‘masters’. From interviews with 29 young women from migrant-sending villages known for its high international migration rates, we highlight how they negotiate the interplay of (gendered) labour migration opportunities which promote their mobilities, and marriage ‘destinies’ which valorise their immobilities. We use young women’s discussions of their aspirations and views towards migration as a departure to analyse the entangled relationship between labour migration and marriage (prospects). Using a relational approach complemented with ‘logics for aspiring’ (Zipin et al. 2015), we argue that their constructions of mobility projects are dynamically negotiated in the interstices between individual aspirations and social (gendered) obligations.

KEYWORDS:

• labour migration
• young women
• aspirations
• gendered roles
• relational approach
• marriage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Choon Yen Khoo was a Research Associate in the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Her research interests include labour migration from/within Indonesia and Southeast Asia, gender and migration, youth aspirations and return migration. Her Masters thesis explores young Indonesian rural women’s aspirations and negotiation of adulthood within Indonesia’s educational context and feminised migration phenomenon. She also produced a short film, Mimpi Anak Desa (Small Town, Big Dreams) which interrogates the impact of parental migration on young people’s aspirations in Ponorogo, Indonesia.

Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Professor (Provost’s Chair) in the Department of Geography as well as Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Her research interests include the politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities, and she has considerable experience working on a wide range of migration research in Asia, including key themes such as cosmopolitanism and highly skilled talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration, national identity and citizenship issues; globalising universities and international student mobilities; and cultural politics, family dynamics and international marriage migrants.

ORCID

Choon Yen Khoo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9538-7118

Notes

1 Zipin et al. (2015: 238) argues that unlike doxic and habituated aspirations, emergent aspirations are difficult to recover through subject interviews alone as they are ‘too incipient for ready expression in language’, and instead require resourcing and educative capacitation. In the case of rural Java, we observe that at a time of structural economic change when women can avail themselves of labour migration pathways as resources to advance their socio-economic status in the household vis-à-vis men’s, ‘the sinews of aspiration as a cultural capacity are built and strengthened’ (Appadurai 2004: 83) and hence more easily articulated.

2 Based on Indonesia’s national regulations, the legal minimum age for working internationally is 18, and 21 for domestic work specifically. Popular destination countries (for example Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia) also stipulate a minimum legal age of 21 for migrant workers, with the exception of Singapore which stipulates a minimum age of 23 for its pool of foreign domestic workers.

3 From the Migrating Out Of Poverty (MOOP) database of 1203 households, 363 households had at least one member who was female and between 15 and 24 years old (N = 415) during the first interview in 2015. Four-fifths of the young women aged 15–24 years were single, and about one-third have ever migrated for work (i.e. currently away, or have returned). See Khoo et al. (2014) for details.

Additional information

Funding

This material has been funded by UK Aid from the UK government; however the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies.