Articulations of Aspirations, Mobility and Belonging: Indian Expatriate Women in the United Arab Emirates

The paper sheds light on the presence of Indian expatriate women in the United Arab Emirates and explores their lived experiences in global city spaces of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The Indian community in the UAE has deep historical roots but experienced an exponential growth in volume following the oil boom in the 1970s. While men have dominated these migratory channels, the diversification of the economy and the allowance for family reunification has increased the presence of Indian women. Despite the changing composition of the Indian migrant population, the majority of literature has focused on the experiences of domestic workers and nurses, leading to the erasure of other forms of gendered migration experiences in global cities. Through ethnographic work conducted with Indian women in the United Arab Emirates in 2020-21 and centering the aspirations of interlocutors, the proposed paper aims to study the lived experiences of Indian expatriate women, with a focus on skilled women, across three interrelated dimensions. One, skilled women’s migration strategies are not straightforward, and involve continuous slippages between individualistic and family-oriented negotiations. Consequently, the type of migration channel chosen and socioeconomic positionalities impinge on their labour market options and outcomes, causing dissonances in their expectations for economic and social mobility. Finally, the classed positionalities of expatriate women impacts the spatial and social spaces they occupy in these global cities and shapes their belonging and processes of place-making in the UAE. By extending migration literature beyond domestic workers and nurses and capturing the confluences of the economic and social dimensions of gendered migration, the paper highlights the changing contours of migratory patterns and thus, the resultant diversities of lived experiences in global cities.