Paper short abstract:

Based on ethnographic data collected over twenty years in rural and urban Kerala, as well as in a number of Gulf countries, the paper focuses on the affective and intimate lives of migrants and how these are represented and discussed in both Kerala and the Gulf.

Paper long abstract:

In both Kerala and the Gulf, migrants' moral orientations and practices are persistently scrutinized, in the public sphere as much as within families and communities. Migrants are found morally lacking, regularly accused of demanding extravagantly high dowries, cheating friends and relatives over money, printing fake currency, lending money at extortionate interests, consuming too conspicuously, failing to support, or even abandoning wives and children, and so on. Whilst migration has been endowed with the capacity of causing all the "social ills" allegely affecting modern Kerala, migrants' sexuality is a particular concern. "Sex parties" with alcohol and prostitutes, pornography, extramarital affairs, excessive masturbation and homosexuality appear to be the staple diet of male migrants, both in the Gulf and when they return to Kerala.

The paper argues that concerns about the 'immorality' of Gulf migrants underscore wider predicaments and ambiguities that inevitably disrupt the production of a Kerala modern constituted around the redefinition of masculinities and femininities in the context of a neo-patriarchal, and firmly heterosexual, nuclearised family. The apparent moral panic surrounding migrants' sexual practices reflects the crisis of an idealised bourgeois conjugal life that for many (non-middle class) Malayalis either remains beyond reach or generates substantial ambiguities. The centrality of migration to the production of modern subjectivities and practices makes it inevitable that blame is being laid at the door of those who are employed in the Gulf. However, it is working