Remittance practices in rural Bangladesh: A gendered analysis

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a gendered analysis of remittance behaviour in households that depend on overseas earnings. Applying the conceptualisation of gender as ‘doing’ and ‘performativity’ to migrant communities in Bangladesh, it discovers the functioning of various subject positions adopted by men and women as remitters, receivers, providers and managers. While these fluid subjectivities face opposition from the prevailing gender norms, which see men as the providers and women as the carers of the household, the paper depicts the multiple ways in which men and women conform to and negotiate with these norms and thus normalise their position. It offers fresh insights into the linkages between remittance practices and gender beyond essentialist claims of dependency, empowerment and development.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• performativity
• remittances
• Bangladesh
• intra-household bargaining
• labour migration

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the support received from the Department for International Development (DfID), RPC of the University of Sussex, UK and the Refugee and Migratory Movements Research Unit (RMMRU), my colleague Dr Jalaluddin Sikder and the research team who have made it possible to write this paper. My sincere thanks to Dr Dorte Thorsen for providing me with the intellectual inputs during the course of the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Bangladesh Bank data. Available in www.bangladeshbank.org. Accessed on 20 March 2019.

2. Bangladeshi Taka.

3. 1 US$ was between Bangladeshi Taka 77.99 − 78.74 in December 2013 to December 2015 (Source: http://usd.fxexchangerate.com/bdt/ (accessed on 19 December 2015).

4. 1 US$ = 78 Bangladeshi Taka (BDT).

5. Pseudonyms were used for all respondents to maintain their anonymity and confidentiality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Syeda Rozana Rashid

Syeda Rozana Rashid, Ph.D is a Professor in International Relations at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She earned a Master of Science in Forced Migration from the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, UK and did her Ph.D on Labour Migration from the Sussex Centre for Migration Research, University of Sussex, UK. Over the last twenty years, she has extensively worked on migration, which was published as books, book chapters and journal articles at home and abroad. Forced and voluntary migration, poverty, gender, social protection, risk and livelihoods are among her areas of research interest.