Anthropology
Muslim men are often portrayed in academic and popular discourses as violent patriarchs and/or as terrorists. Against the backdrop of an increasingly hostile environment within the United Kingdom, this book explores the experiences of Muslim migrant husbands in the Pakistani and Kashmiri diaspora. The uncertainties of migrant journeys tethered to cultural and religious marital norms intersect with gendered experiences of masculinity across space and time. In-depth interviews with 62 migrant husbands shed light on the precarity and vulnerability they experience. Their aspirational masculinities often start in the home country with collective familial dreams of migration, but can turn sour through the exposure of domestic and employment power dynamics upon arriving in the United Kingdom. The ethnography highlights experiences of domestic violence experienced by migrant husbands, which supports the notion of an in-between or liminal masculinity becoming a lived reality for these men on the move, ultimately resulting in novel ways in which a reassertion of masculinity is sought through religious Sufi traditions and musical lamentations. The book weaves together transnational dynamics between people and place along the contours of colonial legacies, showing the self and other power dynamics present within a single group identity. Violence is inflicted on incoming migrants by British-born or British citizen counterparts, through the immigration system. The book shows how citizenship can be weaponised as a performance of whiteness, namely White power, resulting in the notion that gender is performed on.
Throughout my fieldwork, migrant husband interlocutors often spoke to me about how skin colour was a factor influencing their marital choice in some way. The connections between ideas of whiteness and marriage and the persistent legacy of colonialism became increasingly glaring. This overlap is further underlined when the type of passport or citizenship held by the prospective bride or groom transacts and determines the success of the rishta. In many ways, citizenship status demonstrated by the colour of one’s passport has replaced the merit of the colour of one’s skin as a vehicle for social status and mobility. What happens when we consider the intersection of skin colour and passport colour in a transnational context? What can we learn about the intricate workings of gender, race, and colonialism? Does marriage migration in any way draw on this relationship and, if so, what role does this play in constructing multiple masculinities for migrant husbands? In this chapter, I consider the interplay between gender, race, and colonialism to understand the experience of Pakistani and Kashmiri Muslim migrant husbands. I also map out what a project focusing on the decolonising of Muslim men entails, and trace both the significance and the implications of such a project.
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.
This chapter analyzes Bolivian women’s relations with the Chilean state through its agencies and local officials. Three thematic axes delimit its main discussions: (1) the processes of migratory documentary regularization; (2) access to public health; and (3) access to housing. The main objective of the chapter is to show how borderization processes led by the Bolivian and Chilean states have a particular impact on the women due to the intersectionality of their migratory, gender, and ethnic status. The ethnographic findings reveal an intimate relationship between the violations operated by the Chilean state by denying basic rights to these women, and their mobilities and the development of female agency. Furthermore, these data show that transborder displacements are strategies performed by women to solve everyday family problems.
This chapter analyzes the testimonies of Bolivian Aymara women about the relationship between the unequal constitution of gender divisions of labor in their families of origin, the productive and reproductive overloads faced by them and their female relatives, and the articulation of transborder chains of care that sustain these women’s mobilities. The chapter starts with an overview of the application of the concept of care in the study of transnational and transborder mobility. Then, the female testimonies are analyzed to show the contradictions the gender mandate implies for the migrant women. The chapter also deepens in the patterns of overload that the interviewees experience and the feminine chains of mutual support that they articulate to respond to gender inequalities. Finally, it resizes some key concepts applied in the studies of transnational female migration to provide them with analytical precision in contexts where mobilities are articulated from the ethnic structuring of kinship.