Abstract
This paper details the changes in the agency and autonomy of left-behind women of international migrant-men exploring continuity and changes in the discourse and systems of traditional gender roles of a village in rural Bangladesh. It sheds light on the pattern of trans-border communication of the women and their mobility in the locality and subsequent changes in gender relations. Through ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examined how women rearrange their culturally constructed boundaries and meanings of their gender. This study also explored whether these changes are temporal for the migration period and what happens when husbands return permanently. The study followed the post-structural and intersectional feminist approaches and suggested that men’s migration creates a situation where some women get the advantages of widening their room for manoeuvre, which may be sustained after the return of their spouse. Key words: Agency, autonomy, mobility, migration, manoeuvre.
Highlights
The migration of men leaving their women is an increasingly common migration pattern in South Asia and other developing countries (Desai and Banerji, 2008, Gardner, 2009)
It has revealed that women‟s experience of managing households, transborder communication, and spatial mobility in the locality have created a situation where many women get rooms to manoeuvre within cultural codes
The study has shown that many new wives of ekloge households secretly save a portion of their personal expenses in their natal home whilst the wives of bhinno households maintain good relations with their husbands to create a position in the household
Summary
The migration of men leaving their women is an increasingly common migration pattern in South Asia and other developing countries (Desai and Banerji, 2008, Gardner, 2009). The consequence of migration is experienced very acutely by the leftbehind women of migrant-men (Hugo, 2000; Gardner, 1995, 2006). This paper aims to address how women conform, negotiate or resist dominant discourses and practices of gender relations, and express their agency and autonomy in a Muslim society following their husbands' migration abroad. The migration of men gives women a chance to play the role of their absent husbands (Gardner, 1995). This shift may enable these women to become more authoritative, positively influencing their property ownership, productive decision-making, household expenses, and personal freedom (Fakir and Abedin, 2020).
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