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

About this book

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 womens 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 womens labor within the household is vital to the functioning of the flexible and transnational system of IT itself.