Gender, marriage, and the dynamic of (im)mobility in the mid-Western hills of Nepal

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the relationship between gender, marriage, and (im)mobility in rural hilly areas of mid-Western Nepal, showing how (1) the mobility of men is predicated on the ‘immobility’ of women, with marriage being key to the gendered dynamic of (im)mobility, (2) how the construction of hegemonic masculinity, exemplified by a figure of a successful international migrant, is inseparable from an ideal of femininity vested in the figure of a virtuous domesticated housewife. Examining different scales of mobility, the paper cautions against posing a rigid dichotomy between ‘mobile men’ and ‘immobile’ women, illustrating that the ‘left behind’ wives experience an impressive degree of everyday mobility in contrast to their internationally mobile husbands.

KEYWORDS:

• Nepal
• gender
• migration
• mobility
• immobility
• masculinity
• femininity
• marriage

Acknowledgments

The research for this paper has been supported by the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and John Fell Oxford University Press Fund. The first draft of the paper was presented at the conference ‘Ethnographies of Gender and Mobility’ at Vrije University Amsterdam, and I am grateful to the participants for their comments. I am grateful to Bandita Sijapati and the Centre for the Study of Labour and Mobility in Nepal for supporting me in designing the survey. I would like to thank Mimi Sheller and the two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions on the earlier versions of this paper. I am indebted to my research participants for all the time devoted to sharing their stories and lives with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Following Connell and Messerschmidt (2005, 832), I am using the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’ to denote a pattern of practice and a set of discourses, ‘which embody the most currently honoured way of being a man’ and which ideologically legitimates subordination of women to men.

2. See Bhadra (2013) for the discussion of domestic violence as one of the main push factors for female migration ‘in Nepal and Simkhada et al. (2018) for an overview of education, caste and marital background of female migrants.

3. According to Ahmad, who worked with Nepali domestic workers in Kuwait (2017), when she visited her interlocutors’ homes in Nepal, she realized that many people in the community were not aware of the international mobility of women.

4. The level of female outmigration varies a lot in different parts of Nepal. Thus, in Dhanusha, Siraha and Jhapa – districts with the highest number of labour permits issued in 2014/15 – only 0.2, 0.1 and 2.23 per cent of labour permits were issued to women. In Sindupalchowk, Makwanpur, Kathmandu and Kavrepalanchowk – districts with the highest proportion of female migrants – 19.4, 10.8, 19.9 and 10,9 per cent of labour permits were issued to women (Government of Nepal, Ministry for Labour and Employment 2016, 73–75).

5. Almost no in-depth studies have been done with female migrants in the destination countries, i.e. in Malaysia and the Gulf, except for Ahmad (2017). Little work has been done on the plight of the ‘left behind’ elders (but see Speck 2017), with the ‘left behind women’ having been the primary focus so far.

6. This article uses the old administrative division of Nepal, because much of the fieldwork was done before the restructuring and because all of the currently available statistical data is based on the old administrative division.

7. Kafala is a system of controlling labour migrants mostly in the Gulf states through the use of the so-called sponsors, who provide a work visa to migrant workers. Under this system, migrants can legally work only for their sponsor; they cannot change jobs and cannot even leave the country without a special exit visa.

8. For a discussion of how the migration process is linked with the moralizing discourse, see Reeves (2011), Galam (2017), McEvoy et al. (2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship under Grant [ECF-2015-465] and John Fell Oxford University Press Fund.