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In this article, I examine violence as constitutive of mobility for the feminine diasporic subject through an examination of women migrant workers from Nepal. I frame this project with two distinct theoretical approaches to understanding violence. First, I draw upon Catharine MacKinnon's provocative question 'Are women human?' to elucidate points of disjuncture between individual women migrants and state policy that dehumanises them. Second, I address some of the gaps in MacKinnon's work by turning to Judith Butler's theory of violence as primarily embodied in the corporeal subject. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with returned women migrant workers, I examine three moments in the migration process that demonstrate how violence operates ubiquitously in and through circuits of mobility. I conclude that by putting Butler's and Mackinnon's approaches to violence in dialogue and examining the Nepali case through a dialectic framework, intriguing possibilities for approaching migration and its problematics are revealed.

ABSTRACTThis article considers the working lives of women who drive electric rickshaws, known as tempos, in Kathmandu, Nepal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author examines drivers' precarious working conditions and the strategies they use in an effort to secure better conditions and job security. This case study illuminates the particulars of women tempo drivers' day‐to‐day experiences and also speaks to larger debates in feminist political economy surrounding women's entrance into the paid labour force, especially in South Asia. Women drivers provide a compelling example of how socio‐economically disadvantaged women in industrializing and urbanizing cities of the global South find ways to create and protect spaces of dignified work and worker solidarity despite myriad challenges. Evidence from the research suggests that both informal and more formalized coping and resistance strategies are important mechanisms through which women seek to change the terms of their labour.

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In the last 30 years women have been making significant inroads into Nepal's public sphere, troubling long-held normative assumptions about women's place in modern Nepal. In this article I examine the discursive strategies that working-class Nepali women employ to justify and legitimate their presence in Nepal's urban public spaces and simultaneously claim an identity as a modern Nepali woman. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of one group of publicly visible women, female trekking guides, I provide a close analysis of how spatial language is leveraged by both state actors and informants to articulate multiple, sometimes conflicting, messages about Nepali women's "place" in contemporary society. In particular, I focus on the use of spatial metaphors, showing how informants use terms such as inside, outside, forward, and backward to locate themselves within narratives of modernity, development, and national progress. I conclude by showing that unlike women in other examples from the global South, who have framed their emergent presence in the public sphere as an extension of a traditionally feminine and domestic role, informants in the present case study appropriate a masculine language of overt publicness and mobility to justify their visibility. In so doing, informants author themselves as agents of modernity rather than objects of the state's development efforts.

Foreign labor migration has been an historically common livelihood strategy for young Nepali men. Increasingly, young women have migrated abroad for work as well in spite of a number of gender discriminatory migration laws that limit women's access to legal labor migration channels. To what extent out-migration will be employed by women as a livelihood strategy in the post-earthquake context remains to be seen. This paper focuses specifically on young women's migration decision-making in the immediate aftermath of the 2015 April/May earthquakes. Using survey data collected from two districts in July 2015 – one severely earthquake-affected district and one less-affected district – the research is guided by a vulnerabilities approach to disasters. This paper considers how the April/May earthquakes have affected young women migrants' decision-making processes around future migration as a livelihood strategy and how the earthquake may have a synergistic affect with existing gender discriminatory migration and citizenship laws and local systems of social stratification to exacerbate and multiply women labor migrants' vulnerabilities.

This article considers the current age and gender discriminatory migration laws in Nepal in their historical and sociocultural context. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork and data collected from both migrants and migration policymakers I ask, What are the consequences of discriminatory laws on young Nepali women's migration experiences? And why do gender and age discriminatory laws and policies persist in light of evidence that they may actually endanger migrants? I posit that historically dominant Hindu gender norms provide the basis for the paternalistic migration laws currently in place. I argue that age and gender discriminatory migration policies are rooted in patriarchal concern for women's ijaat (social honour) and sexual purity. The result of discriminatory law is not a reduction in migration but an increase in irregular and illegal migration that exacerbates women labour migrants' vulnerability to a variety of abuses. I conclude that examining discriminatory migration laws with an intersectional lens raises interesting possibilities for theorizing how and why these ineffectual laws persist. ; Cet article se penche sur la législation discriminatoire actuelle en matière de migration concernant l'âge et le sexe au Nepal et son contexte historique ainsi que socio-culturel. En faisant appel aux données de sondage et denature ethnographique provenant des migrants ainsi que des responsables en matière de politique migratoire, je considère en premier lieu: quelles sont les conséquences des lois discriminatoires sur les migrantes népalaises jeunes? Et quelles sont les raisons pour lesquelles des lois discriminatoires concernant l'âge et le sexe persistent encore à la lumière des indications démontrant que ces lois risquent en fait de mettre en danger les migrants? J'estime que le sexe hindou dominant sur le plan historique fournit la base sur les lois paternalistes actuelles, et que les lois discriminatoires concernant l'âge et le sexe sont ancrées dans un ordre patriarcal du ijaat (l'honneur social) et de ...

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.