Gender and sexuality collection

This chapter is comprised of three sections: ‘Migrant husbands and waithood’, ‘Domestic violence’, and ‘Reworking of gender power’. The first section considers the precarious lives that migrant husband can often lead upon marriage and migration to the United Kingdom, which is largely informed by their waithood, and often results in their emasculation. I show how prolonged waithood is becoming a permanent state that is gradually replacing conventional markers of adulthood. In the second section of the chapter, I consider the subordinate position of migrant husbands in the marriage household, and demonstrate how this can at times lead to forms of domestic violence against the migrant husband, rendering him silent and invisible in diverse social and political fields. The final section considers the changing nature of gender and family dynamics, bringing into question our understandings of honour, patriarchy, and the state. More broadly, this chapter destabilises our current understandings of gender dynamics within Muslim communities and, more specifically, the British Pakistani and Kashmiri communities, as it demonstrates that men can also be victims of oppression and abuse. Drawing on Turner’s work on liminality, the crux of my argument in this chapter is that, due to experiences of precarity and waithood, migrant husbands experience a liminal masculinity that exposes them to being transacted. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on how the insights gained through the case of Pakistani British migrants can apply to other transnational marriage migration journeys elsewhere, in Europe or North America.

At the margins of the dominant social structure, I found migrant husbands engaged in musical lamentations rooted in Sufi musical forms such as qawwali and Sufiyana qalaams. Typically known within the literature as a form of female agency and resistance, the laments enabled the construction of alternative spaces, wherein migrant husbands could perform resistance and agency but, more significantly, initiate, engage, and enact the process of the reworking of the self. I term these musical lamentations ‘Songs of Sorrow’, wherein migration processes invert the social positions of migrant husbands as powerful men in control of their lives and the lives of those around them – typical of patriarchal societies. Their identities were, instead, reconstructed and transacted through the constant encountering, and eventual acceptance, of their weak and vulnerable positions. This chapter is guided by the question: to what extent and in what ways do these songs enable migrant husbands to negotiate and reassert their masculinity, which has become unsettled through their migratory experiences? The chapter illuminates our understanding of emotion in expressions and (re)formations of masculinity through music and resistance in new ways, enriching the field of minority language and music, specifically the anthropology of lamentations. More broadly, the chapter also provides insights into the ways in which aspirations of migrant husbands can be revised and retransacted in and through migration.

Sufi and neo-Sufi teachings of Islam are popular in the United Kingdom, with many internationally recognised scholars regularly visiting to speak to British audiences. The city of Birmingham is home to branches of a number of Sufi orders, as many of the youth within city’s Muslim community – many of whom belong to the British Pakistani and Kashmiri communities – have developed an appetite for purist forms of Islamic teachings that are divorced from the Pakistani and Kashmiri cultures. Such sentiments have risen from greater Saudi influence among British Muslims, particularly through the Wahhabi movement. Although many of the Sufi orders and their religious congregations in zawiyas remain largely unexplored within academic discourses, engagement of incoming migrants with these Sufi orders has also yet to receive academic enquiry. It is against this rich backdrop, born out of the intersection of Islamic traditions, migration, social media and technological advances, generational differences in religious and cultural practice, and resistance narratives, that the current chapter rests, and upon which migrant husband experiences are mapped. I particularly question whether, in the face of increased vulnerability and precarity upon marriage migration to the United Kingdom, Sufi orders play a role in migrant husband masculine (re)construction, and practices of resistance. Further, I question how the techniques employed in becoming a migrant husband prior to marriage migration fare against the techniques for remaining a migrant husband upon marriage migration.

Against the backdrop of migration from Pakistan and Azad Kashmir to Britain, which has spanned seven decades, in this chapter I trace the diversity of experiences of migrant husbands prior to their marriage migration to explore how they are ‘made’ as both an immigrant category and aspiration, and the performative aspects of their pre-departure preparations. In doing so, I explore the social trajectory travelled by migrant husbands by situating them within their own family history and in the myriad social, cultural, and emotionally laden power relations in which they are embedded. I thus steer away from viewing migration as a singular, insulated decision made in a single point in time and, instead, view migration as a process, an ongoing series of negotiations that involve multiple actors, unfolding through aspirational trajectories, which often begin during the migrant husbands’ childhood, to their grooming and clothing constructions, through the rishta search and acceptance processes. I show that the migrant husband’s ideal masculine position is the transnational patriarch, made up of the family man, the business man, and the respected man, which he attempts to satisfy across transnational borders.

The Coda argues that like the first three Romantic-period novels covered in Injured Minds, Wide Sargasso Sea reimagines the love-mad maid to expose the forms of patriarchal control and abuse that inflict psychological damage on women. Failed male guardianship, unjust marriage laws, and libertine male behaviour all work together in Wide Sargasso Sea to drive a sympathetic young heroine to madness while the male perpetrator hides behind a flimsy screen of medical science. While on the surface the heroine, Antoinette, may look like a love-mad maid, she does not lose her mind because she loses her man. Rather, she is driven mad by her husband’s purposeful actions and by his determination that she is mad, which compounds the psychological damage she has already suffered from a traumatic past that includes her mother’s own male-inflicted injuries. Like the feminist authors of the early Romantic period, Rhys gives the mad woman both a backstory and a subjectivity to which the reader has access. This backstory, which combines the inner monologues of both Antoinette’s husband (an unnamed Mr Rochester) and the woman he calls ‘Bertha,’ inculpates not only the husband himself, but also the very avenues of patriarchal control identified and exposed by Rhys’s predecessors over a century and a half before. Abusive male power replaces lost love as the cause of ‘Bertha’s’ mental affliction in this classic revision of the classic literary incarnation of female madness.

Chapter three focuses on an admirable heroine who, like Fenwick’s Sibella, is psychologically destroyed by guardianship, libertinage, and Rousseauvian educational ideas. In Hays’ hands, the guardian is enlightened and well-meaning, not retrograde and tyrannical; nonetheless, he injures the heroine, Mary Raymond, by following Rousseauvian ideas about isolating children to preserve them from social contamination. The chapter examines Mary’s battles with melancholia as she struggles to recover from her privileged lover’s abandonment and her sexual assault by a powerful man and attempts to avoid her mother’s fate as a fallen woman. Through Mary’s story, Hays makes the point that women’s mental disease comes directly from their disadvantaged position in relation to men, and most particularly from libertinage in its most destructive form—as a social practice that controls women through sexual assault. In contrast to both Wrongs of Woman and Secresy, Victim of Prejudice never considers the role of sentimental literature or the romantic imagination in women’s plight, which makes the line of causality from men’s actions to women’s victimization more direct and the novel more didactic. Although it focuses much more than the other two novels on just one avenue of male control, Victim concludes, like Secresy, with the tragic death of its heroine from mental illness and with the failure of female friendship to provide shelter from male abuse. And like Secresy, Victim ends by suggesting that the only salvation for women is to write tragic novels that might prompt men to reform their ways.

This chapter argues that Amelia Opie rejects physiological models for women’s madness and revises the victimization plots written by Wollstonecraft, Fenwick, and Hays to establish the impossibility of love-madness. Opie does so through turning the story of the love-mad maid into a tale about a love-mad man—about a father who loses his mind when his daughter, Agnes, runs away with an officer. The daughter, too, experiences bouts of madness, but these are caused entirely by her own actions—by her remorse over the mental injury she has inflicted on her father. Although the novel seems to reinforce structures of male control by blaming the daughter for her own and her father’s illnesses, Opie demonstrates a considerably more diverse set of ideas about mental disease and male avenues of power than one might assume. In reversing the narrative of the love-mad maid, Opie shifts gendered power dynamics to make the daughter the guardian of the father after he goes mad. Through the love-mad father and various other ineffectual older men, the novel criticizes patriarchal structures not for abusiveness, but rather for weakness. Opie also downgrades the importance of romantic love for women and gives her female characters considerable self-determination. Although the novel ends with Agnes’s death, Opie, like Edgeworth, resists seeing women as psychologically damaged victims of male control. Instead, women in her novel demonstrate considerable moral and mental strength in that they are capable of great acts of courage and sacrifice in the service of those they love.

The introduction situates novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie within two inter-related eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century contexts: the medical understanding of madness and the sentimental literary convention of the love-mad maid. With sections explaining mania, melancholia, hypochondriasis, and hysteria, the introduction shows how medical models for understanding madness in the period were shifting from a somatic to a psychogenic model except where women's mental afflictions were concerned. The introduction offers a related reading of the convention of the love-mad maid (the woman who loses her mind when she loses her lover) as a figure that permitted society to divert its attention away from the systemic injustices that allowed women to be mentally and emotionally injured by men. The introduction argues that both medical models for female madness and the convention of the love-mad maid provided rationales for male domination that explained women’s madness through inherent physical and mental weakness. The radical authors Wollstonecraft, Fenwick, and Hays, as well as the more moderate Edgeworth and Opie, all recognized that both medical and sentimental renditions of female madness made it possible for male guardians, libertines, and husbands to hide their culpability for inflicting psychological damage on women. The introduction makes the claim that these five authors, through creating psychologically afflicted female characters, critiqued and revised the gender-based power dynamics rooted in medical and sentimental discourses that facilitated male power by circulating models of inherent female frailty.

The chapter argues that Wollstonecraft reworks the inter-connected medical and sentimental models for women’s madness in order to expose the systems of male power that defined both health and disorder for women and that produced the states they pathologized. Although Wollstonecraft subscribed to the commonly held eighteenth-century belief that women of refinement were more susceptible than men and other women to mental afflictions, her novel demonstrates that husbands, with their legal rights and social privileges, inflict on women the injuries that cause melancholia and other nervous disorders. Wollstonecraft also identifies sentimental literature—particularly novels by Rousseau—as a potent avenue of male power that, by offering itself as an antidote to the repressions of marriage, entraps women in destructive romantic fantasies. Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria Venables, is ensnared by her romantic imagination while imprisoned in a madhouse by her husband, which suggests that sentimental literature is as harmful to women as is the power the law gives to husbands. Wollstonecraft includes in her critique a restaging of the vignette of the love-mad maid that exposes how sentimental literature, in addition to producing distracting, destructive fantasies for women, also allows men to benefit morally from the harm they inflict. Wollstonecraft offers women some strategies for resistance in the form of life-writing and female friendship, but the novel’s lack of a conclusion makes it impossible to determine if Wollstonecraft believed women could escape from the linked, psychologically destructive forces of marriage, sentimental literature, and the romantic imagination.

The first part of this chapter argues that in the novel’s Lady Delacour section, Edgeworth draws on the ideas of David Hartley and Alexander Crichton to replace female frailty and male avenues of power with a new, gender-neutral psychological model for madness that draws on false associations, misplaced passions, and remorse. By incorporating the new treatment techniques of moral management, Edgeworth positions Belinda as a mental-health practitioner who guides Lady Delacour back to rational control and emotional balance. Edgeworth’s focus on recovery and on ungendered models of madness where Lady Delacour is concerned severs the association Wollstonecraft, Fenwick, and Hays made between women’s mental afflictions and male abuse. In this way, Edgeworth’s Lady Delacour plot functions as a repudiation of her contemporaries’ conviction that women were trapped by structures of male control. The chapter’s second section, however, argues that Edgeworth uses the Virginia plot to cast Rousseau’s Émile as a text that conveys an educational ideology founded on a male sexual fantasy that is harmful to women. Edgeworth offers considerable insight into how a Rousseauvian education damages women’s minds by attempting to make them into passive, childlike sexual objects. The gendered Rousseauvian education that harms women through breeding passivity and fostering the romantic imagination is the only avenue of male control Edgeworth is willing to entertain. But Edgeworth shows this form of control to be an improbable work of the imagination. In this way, she dispatches both the threat of gendered educational models and her contemporaries’ narratives of psychological victimization.