Doing Gender, Doing Culture: Gendered Labor and Intersectional Identities in Diasporic Community Building

• In Event: 3251 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 11. Gender and Work

Abstract

This paper focuses on Indian diasporic community formation in a small rural U.S. town. It explores how immigrant community formation is a gendered and racialized process and how intersectional identities are negotiated in the creation of a ‘home away from home’. Based on a combination of semi-structured interviews and multi-sited ethnography, the study delineates how traditional gender roles are invoked and employed to create diasporic communities in a specific way and how this gendered labour is not incidental but central to the way the community is formed and maintained. It focuses on how men and women are expected to perform different kinds of labor – both physical and emotional, the elaborate process of mothers ‘doing culture’ for their children and the simultaneous prescription and proscription of certain activities and roles for the children. I argue that these serve to suture the community together, just as they have the potential to act as fault lines within the community.

I begin by describing the larger context of the South Asian and specifically Indian diasporic community formation in the U.S. I show how gender emerges as the main channel through which the work of community building is organized in terms of who does what to keep the community together. The work of maintaining and ‘doing culture’ is achieved by ‘doing gender’. I also discuss how socialization and childrearing done in a specific way within the diasporic community emerges as the lynchpin of maintaining the distinctiveness and the Indian identity of the community. I unpack these themes and in turn discuss when and how gender, ethnicity, religion, age and race operate independently from each other and when they operate together. What emerges is a story about gender, religion, ethnicity, race, culture and the elaborate processes of building a diasporic community, focused on gendered labor.

Author

• Debadatta Chakraborty, University of Massachusetts, Amherst