Failures of Marital Provisioning and the Framing of Agency by Migrant Domestic Workers from Kerala

The major structuring contexts of cross-border labour migration from India do not enable the mobility of women, yet women from Kerala are a visible presence in jobs such as domestic work in the Middle East. Overseas mobility removes women from the everyday regulatory scope of local / family patriarchy. Cultural norms that restrict women’s autonomous mobility, independent of their families, and mandate marital control over their sexuality informs from Kerala have been migrating as domestic workers for more than half a century. Thus, I ask how do aspiring women overcome cultural barriers at home and obtain access to mobility or in other words, what negotiations underpin women’s movement? The women whose narratives I analyse here turned to overseas jobs to improve their lives; but they emphasize the failures of normative marital provisioning as the impetus for migration, directing attention to the compulsion to earn for their and their families’ survival. By highlighting the lack of choice, I argue that migrant women refuse to own their agency in an effort to ground their migration on socially acceptable terms and thereby to garner licit space for migration. The paper draws upon a survey and semi structured interviews with 150 emigrant and returnee women from Trivandrum district, Kerala.