Sponsor
This work was supported by the Social Science Research Council and the University of Illinois (Women and Gender in Global Perspectives program, Graduate College, and the Department of Geography and GIS.)
Published In
Gender, Place & Culture
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-6-2019
Subjects
Internal migration -- India -- Sociological aspects, Seasonal labor -- India -- Social aspects, Labor mobility, Masculinity
Abstract
In this research article, I study seasonal labor migration in rural western India to understand gender negotiations in the course of labor migration. Based on qualitative research conducted in six villages in rural Maharashtra state in Western India during the early Kharif cropping season in 2014 and during Kharif and Rabi cropping seasons in 2015–16, I examine gendered labor in migrant home communities and at various rural and urban employment destinations, the relationship of labor to the social construction of masculinities, and gender negotiations across space. I show that in their home communities, the politics of resistance of returnee laborers can be understood by examining how returnee men deploy ‘protest masculinities’ to subvert claims on their body and labor by elite men who have historically been in a dominant relationship with the laborers. Yet, these protest masculinities are buttressed by the continued exploitation of women’s labor. I also show the flexibility of masculinities. More broadly, I show that migrant destinations themselves are gendered spaces that are constructed by the active consensual work of women and male migrants and employers alike. Second, seasonal migrants enter migration cycles from rural spaces that are gendered, both in production and social reproduction. I find that rural workplaces are the preferred choice of destination for migrant women; a choice that migrant men find reasonable. This is so because rural destinations are already gendered as spaces conducive for social reproduction and discursively constructed in the same terms as the idealized woman subject.
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DOI
10.1080/0966369X.2019.1640188
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/29362
Citation Details
Pronoy Rai (2019): Seasonal Masculinities: Seasonal Labor Migration and Masculinities in Rural Western India, Gender, Place & Culture.
Description
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.