Women, Migration and Labour Exploitation: Challenging Frameworks

Abstract

Migration narratives often resist incorporating a gendered lens, thereby erasing or failing to account for the ‘herstories’ of women, and for persons from marginal backgrounds who move in search of freedom, survival and autonomy. This is not dissimilar to how women’s work, especially when exploitative, has been conceptualised to date. Often formulated as social-reproductive work, this conceptual framework has failed to address the normative considerations that continue to devalue women’s work by frequently seeing it in juxtaposition to productive (valuable) work, complementary and subordinate to it. Despite decades of feminist attention to this and sustained efforts at visibilising women’s work, it has not yet overcome established configurations and grammars that continue to subordinate it. In this article, we consider two case studies in India to highlight some of these persistent blinders that attempt to render visible the situation of women who migrate for work. Focusing on these women’s experiences as migrants and workers, and their efforts to address their precarious and exploitative conditions, allows us to not only reflect on the challenges in better conceptualising these women’s lives but more importantly, to identify what these struggles say about the Indian women’s movement. In both cases, migrant women workers have built solidarity alliances with other women’s networks, and these are fundamental to re-energising the movement.