High-Tech Housewives: Indian IT Workers, Gendered Labor, and Transmigration (Global South Asia) - Softcover

Bhatt, Amy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0295743557 ISBN 13: 9780295743554

Publisher: University of Washington Press, 2018

Synopsis

Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft promote the free flow of data worldwide, while relying on foreign temporary IT workers to build, deliver, and support their products. However, even as IT companies use technology and commerce to transcend national barriers, their transnational employees face significant migration and visa constraints. In this revealing ethnography, Amy Bhatt shines a spotlight on Indian IT migrants and their struggles to navigate career paths, citizenship, and belonging as they move between South Asia and the United States.

Through in-depth interviews, Bhatt explores the complex factors that shape IT transmigration and settlement, looking at Indian cultural norms, kinship obligations, friendship networks, gendered and racialized discrimination in the workplace, and inflexible and unstable visa regimes that create worker vulnerability. In particular, Bhatt highlights women’s experiences as workers and dependent spouses who move as part of temporary worker programs. Many of the women interviewed were professional peers to their husbands in India but found themselves “housewives” stateside, unable to secure employment because of visa restrictions. Through her focus on the unpaid and feminized placemaking and caregiving labor these women provide, Bhatt shows how women’s labor within the household is vital to the functioning of the flexible and transnational system of IT itself.

About this title

Review:

Amy Bhatt offers an empirically rich, theoretically nuanced account of high-tech immigration to the United States, drawing important attention to the interplay of gender, occupation, and family dynamics. This book is essential reading on how the 'temporary' migration of high-skilled workers and their families are fundamentally reshaping our notions of citizenship, social relations, and national belonging.

Author: Karthick Ramakrishnan, director of AAPI Data and professor of public policy, University of California Riverside

From the Author:

Amy Bhatt is associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the coauthor of Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0295743557
• ISBN 13: 9780295743554
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224