The Relational Economy of Aspiration: Gender, Futurity, and Household Hierarchy under Urban Precarity

• In Event: Precarious Work and Workers

Abstract

How does gender hierarchy persist when male breadwinning erodes? Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Muslim migrant households in North India, this paper argues that chronic precarity does not simply deepen existing inequalities — it reorganizes them, relocating patriarchal authority from the control of resources to the control of futurity.
As men's construction earnings decline, households manage volatility by differentially allocating time, risk, and aspiration along gendered lines. Women's paid and unpaid labor is converted into present-tense infrastructure -absorbing income shocks, stabilizing consumption, covering medical crises, while men's trajectories are protected as reversible and future-oriented even when they repeatedly fail. Sons' precarious work is narrated as experimentation; daughters' as necessity. I call this a relational economy of aspiration: a patterned household distribution of time and futurity that protects masculine trajectories as legitimate sites of future-making while tethering feminine ones to the immediate present.
Through three household cases varying in generational composition, I show that this asymmetry is durable across configurations. When sons are present, their platform work and debt-financed ventures remain survivable because women's stabilizing labor has already secured the household's present. When sons are absent, daughters' aspirations do not expand, instead they redirect into forms that generate meaning without threatening existing distributions of risk.
I conceptualize these formations as tethered femininity and aspirational masculinity, produced not through cultural norms or labor market sorting, but through accumulated household decisions that feel inevitable rather than gendered. The paper reframes women's expanded labor force participation under informalization: rather than a pathway to renegotiated authority, intensified paid work can deepen tethering when women's time is treated as infinitely elastic and their futures as indefinitely deferrable. Gender hierarchy endures not because patriarchal roles persist unchanged, but because households unequally allocate the right to imagine a future self.

Author

• Priyanjali Ranabir Mitra, University of Chicago