Migrant Remittances and Masculinity: Between Desire and Double Discredit

This chapter explores the relation between international mobility, masculinity, and remittances in the context of migrant men who are employed as paid care providers within Italian families. Specifically, the analysis addresses the question of how men who emigrate by following their wives negotiate remittances within marriage and of what this reveals about their subaltern class location. Remittances are here understood as a transnational social practice that is informed by gendered community expectations and by migration trajectories and family-cycle. The analysis contributes to the burgeoning debate on the remittance-gender nexus by addressing the understudied relation between migrant men, masculinities and transnational transactions. The analysis suggests how migrant men experience a double discredit. One generated by the inversion of the dominant male-centred migration pathway, while the other addresses migrant men’s downward mobility and gendered racialisation as feminised domestic workers, who are expected by their in-laws networks and employers to prove their deservingness as supportive husband and trustworthy labourers. This double discredit informs migrant men’s im-mobility and dependency experience in Kerala and Italy. It brings them to redefine their roles within transnational households as husbands and to search for a balance between, on the one hand, expectations emerging from renewed kinship and gender hierarchies and, on the other, personal desires for autonomy and marital love.