Bodies That (Don’t) Matter: Desire, Eroticism and Melancholia in Pakistani Labour Migration

Abstract

This paper explores the importance of sexuality in international labour migration from Pakistan, paying special attention to masculine desire and subjectivity (driving forces in sending contexts), and to the bodily experience of travel, transit and the labour process (consequences at destination). The relationships between these two aspects of the migration process are theorised by applying the insights of classical and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Georges Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ and contemporary queer theory to empirical data – interviews with migrant men in London and Florence. It is argued that a theoretically nuanced approach which resists rigid distinctions between sexuality and the economic sphere is required if we are to understand the dynamics of love, sex and romance in migrations that take place against a backdrop of global inequity and intensifying migration controls – dynamics that include the intimate connections between commodity fetishism and scopophilia; between sex and death (via eroticism); between the labour process and a sense of gendered, melancholic loss. The political imperative for such an approach is considerable when we consider the limits of extant academic and media discourse on the populations in question.

Key Words:

• Desire
• eroticism
• melancholia
• gender
• sexuality
• Pakistani labour migrants

Notes

1. Doctoral research was conducted with supervision from Pnina Werbner, whose support was crucial throughout. Additional research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust as part of the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship (UCL and Bristol) during my time with John Salt and Khalid Koser at the Migration Research Unit at UCL in 2003–04.

2. Needless to say, my own privileged class background (and structural location as a British citizen) created distance between myself and my interviewees. This difference, however, was counterbalanced by various kinds of sameness (shared gender, ethnicity, nationality). Age/generation proved to be a crucial index of positionality: interviews with younger men were more relaxed and allowed for discussion of feelings directly related to sexuality. I was far more probing, for example, in the questions I put to Zubair and Faiz, whose testimonies provide important evidence of the arguments I make about sexual deprivation and gendered melancholia. (Any such questioning would have been perceived as highly inappropriate by elders or married men.) The upshot of this was that some interviewees were compelled to reflect consciously upon issues that arguably would have otherwise remained within their ‘subconscious’, a fact that (apart from raising ethical questions about the consequences of research such as this, which is never innocent and almost always constitutes an active intervention in people’s lives) underlines the impossibility of drawing a straight line between consciousness and the subconscious. Freud himself, of course, avoided the term ‘subconscious’ for this very reason: the boundaries between ego and id; reality and the pleasure principle; awareness and disavowal are far more fluid than any rigidly conceived binary schema would allow.

3. Fairness of complexion is commonly invoked as a quintessentially feminine attribute in Punjabi discourse, as evidenced in popular culture such as bhangra song lyrics.