Gendered Custodians of Culture: Religion and the Moral Labor of Ethnic Retention among Pakistani Immigrants

• In Event: South Asia and the Diaspora

Abstract

Drawing on 40 life-history interviews with highly skilled, first-generation Pakistani Muslim Americans, I theorize a gendered moral economy framework to analyze the tensions of migration as families pursue integration and mobility while navigating racialized and Islamophobic contexts that restrict cultural and political belonging. I examine the moral, affective, and gendered labor through which families cultivate and negotiate ethno-cultural and religious continuity. I demonstrate that ethnic continuity is not a passive persistence, but an active process of cultural reproduction shaped by intersecting hierarchies of race, class, gender, family, and religion. Moreover, this framework structures the intergenerational transmission of cultural, familial, and symbolic capital, organizing how obligations and respectability are defined and enacted across generations. By centering moral economies within migration theory, this study
argues that families do not simply endure these constraints; they actively reinterpret them, reorganize household roles and obligations, and transform dislocation into a project of moral and cultural reproduction.

Author

• Maheen Haider, University of Massachusetts-Lowell