Disposability and gendered control in labor migration: Limiting women’s mobility through cultural and institutional norms

In this article, I draw upon interviews with 30 Nepali returned women migrant workers to elucidate how the gendered institutional logics of both the Nepali state and for-profit manpower companies synergistically function to constrain women’s mobility. In particular, I focus on women migrant workers who migrate illegally to Gulf countries to work as domestic laborers, as this constitutes one of the largest channels of women’s labor migration from Nepal. To illuminate the particulars of Nepali women migrant workers’ experiences, I employ two theoretical frameworks, both developed by feminist political economists within the context of feminized workplaces broadly and global factory floors specifically. The first framework presents a logic of female disposability as shaping the feminized workforce of the global South. The second framework presents a logic of gendered control as doing the same. In this article, I show how these dual logics can be applied to women’s foreign labor migration in Nepal, and argue that these logics operate simultaneously through the various institutions that Nepali women navigate during migration. The Nepali case shows how both logics serve ultimately to limit women’s mobility and bolster the authority of institutions and organizations historically controlled by men—for example, the family, the state, transnational corporations—over women migrants. By bringing these two logics to bear on a case of women domestic workers’ migration from the global South, this article offers new insights into the functioning of institutions central to this large-scale, transnational movement of people.