Transnational shift: marriage, home and belonging for British-Pakistani Muslim women

This paper draws on an empirical study, based on interviews and observations, of youthful Pakistani Muslim women raised in Birmingham, UK, to explore transnational marriage practices and their potential for reworking sharply gendered patrilineal norms framing marriage conventions, implicating questions of identity, home and belonging. In the South Asian patrilineal system marriage signals migration for women, displacing home across the natal (maike) where they are symbolic outsiders, and the marital (sasural) home, where they are actual strangers. By contracting transnational marriage, women are able to avoid this dislocation and its disadvantages, transferred onto their overseas grooms which lays the basis for the negotiation of a more egalitarian gender dynamic. The paper explores women's narratives of transnational marriage from the arrangements through to the union and the processes of conjugal bonding and coupling constituted within the spaces of the natal home, circumscribed by the close proximity of the extended natal family. These processes involve the negotiation of differential expectations of the conjugal relationship, illuminating women's shifting aspirations for reconfiguring marital scripts characterised by more egalitarian gender relations. This is in part a reflection of the availability of new repertoires for remaking the self and women's assertion of modern, cosmopolitan, Muslim identities.