Navigating contradictions : female return migration and social change in Tajikistan

Abstract

This dissertation looks at how gender constitutes and is constituted by the migration process. It analyzes what it means for migrant women to return home and reintegrate into their societies after long-term labor migration. As such, it contributes to our understanding of gender transformations in situations of precarious mobility and provides multiple scenarios for dealing with it. Studies of migration have paid scant attention to the history of return and reintegration. Migrants' return, the dissertation argues, is challenging both individually and socially because it entails renegotiation of social orders, gender roles, and the political status of returnees. Returnees become symbols of social and individual change. The study refines the critical migration concepts - "labor migrant," "returnee," and "reintegration" - by analyzing how they apply within a particular emigration-dependent context while constructed within the receiving states' political agendas. It shows that these categories are strategically used to marginalize in the context of return as much as in migration contexts. The study is based on in-depth multilanguage interviews with sixty-five female migrants and over two hundred family and community members in Tajikistan. I argue that gender asymmetry is a product of social order in institutional and socio-political processes while also being a producer of social order at the same time. I have researched the case of return migration to 'post-socialist' Tajikistan. I demonstrate that systematic changes in attitudes toward self, family, and community are part of the reproduction of a double discourse that constitutes the gendered order. Migrant categories are the reflections of the structural inequalities that exist in the context of Tajikistan and Russia. Structural inequalities marginalize many people considered as part of a migrant group.