Constructing and Performing Domesticity

Engaging in a grounded theory approach to Gujarati women’s technical labor, I use ethnographic engagement to theorize the embodied materiality of technical labor as it is racialized and gendered following the Hart–Celler Act of 1965, the civil rights–era legislation that triggered family reunification migration to the United States from India. When immigrant women perform technical labor, I argue it is valued based on its ability to fulfill racialized and gendered scripts and recasts domesticity in the factory. Because the interlocutors in this study are referred to their jobs through social ties of family reunification, the technical value offered by their wage labor and the expertise developed through its practice is overshadowed by its social value, diminishing opportunities to develop worker identity. First, I outline the role that the nation-state plays in socializing women into technical labor roles otherwise unavailable to them. Second, through a short video, I interpret how one interlocutor in particular, Pallavi, frames her own technical labor in socially reproductive terms, drawing on traditional gender scripts of family obligation, even as she engages in the same technical wage labor as men. Both the role of the nation-state and the family are shaped as an outcome of path dependent and family-centric migration policies, which, taken together, co-construct a domesticity in the diaspora.