Interrupting the Middle: Shifting Everyday Practices of Female Nepalese Students in Australia

ABSTRACT

Everyday activities and routines, such as, cooking, cleaning, and shopping, draw attention to the changes, contrasts, and adaptive processes that migrants undertake when settling into new living arrangements and relationships. For those coming from countries with rigid gender hierarchies, such as Nepal, these changes and necessary adaptations to the new socio-cultural practices and more flexible gender roles, often magnify the emotional and relational experiences of migration. This paper explores how female Nepalese students living in Brisbane, Australia experience shifting gender roles and expectations. It expands on the scarce literature on female Nepalese migration, in contrast to the recent growth in females as primary visa holders. Drawing on a series of qualitative interviews and ethnographic reflections, we examine how the more mundane roles and duties of a household are negotiated by these students and their partners. We suggest that attention to the mundane, everyday negotiations of gender between partners and in shared households sheds light on the complexity of migration experiences for Nepalese students living in Australia.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• Nepal
• Australia
• gender
• materiality
• everyday practice

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Narayan Ghimire is a researcher currently based in Nepal. He completed his Masters of Arts in 2019 and has worked as an international Educational Consultant for over a decade in Nepal and recently in Australia. His research interests include: international student mobility, gender, and Nepalese return migration.

Kaya Barry is an artist and cultural geographer working in the areas of mobilities, migration, tourism, material cultures, and arts research. She is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Griffith University, Australia, exploring how migration experiences are conditioned through materiality, everyday routines, and visual aesthetics.