Re-defining the Stay-behind Indonesian Men: Changing Masculinities in the Context of Women’s Transnational Migration

Abstract

Over the last four decades, international contract migration has become a major livelihood strategy for rural denizens in Indonesia; more than 80% of the contract migrants recorded by the Bureau of Manpower were women caregivers and housekeepers to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. The feminization of migration has catalyzed a profound transformation in gender relations in sending communities, as men who stay behind are increasingly forced to renegotiate their gender practices in the absence of their wives. Based on 12 months ethnographic research conducted in Hong Kong and Indonesia, this paper situates changes in gender relations in the context of a new global economy that increasingly incorporates working-class women to the exclusion of men. I argue that left-behind men, despite economic precarity, may take on new roles as primary child caretakers and secondary providers to compensate for their inability to play the traditional breadwinner role. Departing from the feminist literature on “failed patriarchs,” which has assumed that working-class men shun housework because they cannot cope with female breadwinning, my study argues that some left-behind men experiment with women’s gender roles by partaking in childcare, housekeeping, and financial management, even while engaging in waged labor outside the home. My study, in short, engages the burgeoning literature on masculinities and migration by conceptualizing the manner in which working-class men embody a plurality of marginalized masculinities—masculinities that are subordinated due to class, race, sexuality, gender, and other axes of domination—in response to the erosion of the male breadwinner model.