Abstract
Every major global human resources study over the past 5 years has noted a common trend: a dramatic increase in the number of women in the expatriate workforce, and increasingly these expats are single. Using ethnographic observations and interviews with female expats who moved alone to work in Bangalore – the ‘Silicon Valley of India’ – I discuss frictions faced as they negotiate a context where how to get around safely and comfortably in public is the central feature of their daily lives. Using Massey’s concept of ‘power geometry’, the article considers contrasts between the ease of international movement and the obstacles to daily mobility on a local scale, and illustrates how location-based technologies and other strategies are employed to (re)assert control over mobility and space.
With globalization in full swing … a corporate version of wanderlust is on the rise. And the new expatriates are increasingly young, female and single.
Every major global human resources study over the past 5 years has noted a common trend: a dramatic increase in the number of women in the expatriate workforce. Smerd’s use of the word ‘wanderlust’ in the quote above situates this growth in female expatriation as a process of carefree adventure seeking by young women – familiar rhetoric within a globalization discourse that emphasizes the fluid mobility with which ‘kinetic elites’ (Bauman, 2000) traverse the globe. Reflecting on such discourse, Bude and Dürrschmidt (2010) have argued that a propensity to exaggerate the flows inherent to mobility has produced a theory of globalization that ‘lost track of the idea of “limits”’ (p. 483).
While mobile professionals with fast-lane passports may indeed cross borders more easily than those not endowed with global capitalism’s green light, Ley (2004) contends that any look at the everyday lives of transnational subjects will contest the supposed ease with which they slip from one context into another, and complicate assumptions about their ‘invincible identities’ (p. 152). A move to focus on the daily lives of ‘mobile elites’ (e.g. Conradson and Latham, 2005) has begun questioning accounts of ‘transnational mobility as occurring in a hyper-mobile “space of flows”’ and attending to the ‘emplacement of mobile subjects’ (Smith, 2005: 237–238, emphasis in original), with work recognizing the range of ‘practical and emotional challenges’ that confront migrants on the ground (Ho, 2009: 1). Far from a monolithic group knit together by their common mobility, transnational professionals are increasingly seen as ‘embodied bearers of culture, ethnicity, class or gender’ (Yeoh and Willis, 2005: 270), and the mobility and access to space afforded them is understood to be mediated by specific historical, political and cultural contexts (e.g. Blunt, 2007; Dunn, 2010; Smith, 2005).
As a media studies scholar working in what has been called the ‘spatial’ or ‘mobility turn’ (Falkheimer and Jansson, 2006), I have been interested in how communication technologies intersect with lived experiences of mobility, and previous work has focused on how mobile professionals employ technologies to connect offline with others in foreign cities (Polson, 2011, 2015). Through that work, I noted there seemed to be differences in the affordances these place-making technologies granted to women traveling alone, and suggested women’s mobility was enabled by these innovations in important ways. Aware that the number of women in the expatriate workforce was climbing, and wanting to further develop an understanding of how media technologies might support mobile professional women, I decided to look at a context where their presence as women, relocating alone, might appear more challenging due to local gender conventions. I chose India, as the country had made international headlines during the previous year for a growing concern with women’s safety in public. 1 This choice should be qualified, however, first by the point that women all over the world may face gender-based intimidation, and second, by the fact that India is a large country with significant diversity, and cannot be said to have a unified gender culture.
Bangalore presented an interesting site, considering that its development over the past 30 years is linked to the same globalizing forces that are connected to the growth in expatriate labor. Since the Indian government began to liberalize the national economy in the early 1990s, Bangalore has grown as a worldwide hub for information technology research, development and services, and from 1991 to 2011 the city’s population more than doubled in size from 4.1 million to 8.4 million people (Census of India, 2011). Once South India’s leisurely ‘Garden City’, fast-tracked development has choked Bangalore, which struggles to maintain an infrastructure to support garbage and sewer, provide housing, and alleviate traffic congestion. Long-term residents complain how an unchecked surge in automobiles has lowered quality of life and created levels of pollution that have changed the once-temperate climate. Despite its problems, and although Bangalore falls below Delhi and Mumbai in various ‘global city’ rankings, 2 it is, Nisbett (2007) points out, the city whose image seems most ‘to embody the optimistic modernity of “India Shining”’ – a political slogan built around a celebration of a neoliberal India’s emergence as a hi-tech power (p. 936). Saldanha (2002) argues it is the site ‘where the struggle for the definition of [India’s] future is most felt’ (p. 339).
In this article, I discuss the frictions faced by a diverse set of expatriate women as they negotiate daily life in Bangalore. Migration research adopting a gender perspective seeks to interrogate how gender and mobility interact at different scales (Uteng and Cresswell, 2008), with the understanding that the capacities and constraints imparted to male and female actors vary greatly as they cross borders. As Pessar and Mahler (2003) explain, the negotiation of gender relations across transnational contexts will depend on the varied ways in which ‘biological difference [is imbued] with meaning, such as demarcating between male and female domains in activities, tasks, spaces, time, dress’ (p. 813). These varied meanings inform cultural norms that govern gendered behavior in space. Here, I explore contrasts between the ease of international movement and the obstacles to daily mobility on a local scale for expatriate women who have moved alone to Bangalore, and illustrate how location-based technologies and other strategies are employed to (re)assert control over mobility and space.
Gender/space in urban India
As in the West, where gender-based ‘control of spatiality and identity’ was traditionally related to the distinction between public and private spheres (Massey, 1994: 179), a culturally specific version of this separation has been noted of gendered spatial relations in India. Ranade’s (2007) mapping of gendered space in Mumbai found that ‘it is always men who are found occupying public space at rest’ (sitting on low walls, standing around shops or street corners, etc.), while ‘women occupy public space essentially as a transit between one private space and another’ (p. 1521). She argues that women’s presence in public requires a legitimate pretext, such as going to work or school, picking up children, or waiting for a bus. More than simply following cultural convention, Ranade claims these demonstrations of legitimacy are used by women to protect themselves in their everyday movements in public, through what she calls ‘the production of safety through respectability’ (p. 1523).
The opening of the Indian economy ushered in new professional opportunities for women, who have found their bodies and their changing social positions the site of negotiations between traditional and globalizing ideas of the nation (Oza, 2006; Radhakrishnan, 2008). Here, class plays a mediating role in determining women’s ‘respectability’ and access to space. In his study of Western music consumption by young, middle-class males in Bangalore, Saldanha (2002) describes how the car becomes a space in which middle-class youth can move through the city. He reports that, while ‘girls in T-shirts and jeans on Indian streets often have to irritably acknowledge the androcentrism of India’s puritan discourse as they defy the looks of the poorer and more traditional boys’ (p. 343), the ‘girls in the car do not have to fear the gaze of poorer men’ (p. 342). Cresswell (1996) argues that ‘expectations about behavior in place are important components in the construction, maintenance, and evolution of ideological values’ (p. 3), and in Saldanha’s example a layering of class and gender-based ideologies collide: in that it affords them access to the car and Western pop culture, upper-middle-class status allows the young women to push boundaries in behavior and style of dress, yet this also occurs within the context of male protection and approval.
Intersections of gender and class in delimiting mobility and access to social space are captured by what Massey (1994) referred to as ‘power-geometry’, a concept expressing the differentiated relations that varying social groups will have to the ‘flows and interconnections’ of spatial mobility (p. 149). Mobility hierarchies are not fixed, however, and aspirations and strategies for controlling one’s own movement are inflected by myriad social vectors, including gender, ethnicity and class; these positions may change drastically as people ‘flow’ across borders.
Going, and stopping, with the flow
Traveling alone to Bangalore, my plan was to attend various expat-focused events during a 2-week stay, 3 where I hoped to meet people and request interviews. I joined the Bangalore Expat Club (BEC) – a web-organized club whose charismatic Indian leader is practically a brand name among young expatriates in the city, hosting weekly dance parties or pub nights at upscale venues. I also took advantage of a feature on the global online community, internations.org, which allowed access to list of all female members living in Bangalore, and emailed people directly. Finally, I joined the Bangalore Couchsurfing community, cognizant that the global organization had expanded beyond connecting travelers with lodging hosts and now offered a mechanism for reaching out to members for social interaction. I eventually interviewed 10 women, all of whom had moved to India alone; 4 were holders of special visas for Persons of Indian Origin, known as PIOs – created through a program meant to aid the ‘return’ of the offspring of past émigrés. Table 1 provides a basic overview of participants.
Background information on interview participants.
PIO: Person of Indian Origin; NGO: nongovernmental organization.
Interviews started out as conversations about their decisions to move to Bangalore, impressions upon arrival, challenges they had faced, and how they dealt with any obstacles. Considering previous literature on mobility and emplacement, I used interviews to explore how, and whether, this swath of mobile people managed to feel at home or ‘in place’ in the city, which, as Moores and Metykova (2009) point out, ‘involves ordinary doings and feelings that give locations a lived-in quality’ (p. 316), and asked which technologies might have helped them in doing so. Drawing on Massey’s power-geometries, I was interested in understanding how the relatively elite status of these expats, and the economic and social power occasioned by that elite-ness, intersected and perhaps clashed with gender in experiences of settling in.
As women recounted their frustrations, challenges and triumphs, I was intrigued to realize that for these ‘mobile elites’, mobility itself was the primary obstacle in their daily lives.
4
How to get around the city, and how to do so safely, conveniently, and with dignity and confidence, was the prevailing theme of conversations. Even discussion of other issues – making friends, learning local customs, and so on – often came back to a broader concern with how to feel comfortable in, and moving through, the city. Specific complaints ranged from reports of ogling and groping, to awareness of increasing media attention highlighting incidences of violence against women in public places. Issues of discomfort and feeling out of place went beyond what might be explained as people accustomed to being racial majorities suddenly finding themselves in the minority. This point was exemplified by Layla, a PIO from the United States, who recounted how, as a new arrival in Bangalore she would see a White US American and feel relieved, approaching him or her with a sense of ‘Dude, we’re the same!’ only to be given a sideways glance. She explained, Looking at me, they would not recognize that [sameness] in me and it was so frustrating, because … growing up in the States, [you’re] different on the outside, but the same on the inside. But here it’s same on the outside, and different on the inside.
For Layla, it was vexing that because she looked Indian, she ‘blended in with the local people’, yet in the context of belonging or not belonging, she ‘would see white people and identify more with them’. While the White women may have assumed they stood out as minority race, the experiences of the foreign PIOs suggest that their own gender and cultural identities ‘othered’ them in ways that were critical to their emplaced experiences in Bangalore. Jess, a PIO from the United States, voiced doubt about a discourse among some White expats of how race intersected with women’s safety on the street, saying, I have always been a little skeptical of foreign women who say that, you know, ‘It’s not safe to go to India, especially if you are a foreign woman – that white women are targeted’. I think that’s a whole lot of crap. If you are an Indian woman, you are subjected to just the same amount of leering, you know, as a foreign woman.
Additionally, Jess argued, the resources that expat women (of all ethnicities) can draw on if something happens make them ultimately much less vulnerable than local women. A main difference might simply be that most of the expats came from backgrounds where they could expect to be relatively comfortable and independent in public, at least in the daytime. In Bangalore, they pushed to find strategies to meet their expectations for independent mobility in daily life. The alternative would be to envelope themselves in a bubble of safety and convenience – something most of the women rejected.
Avoiding ‘the Bubble’
In her study of ‘family expats’ in Indonesia, Fechter (2007) noted the use of metaphors such as ‘living in a bubble’ to describe the segregated nature of their lives abroad, and Bangalore is not without its own ‘bubble’ cultures. Attempting to gain distance from the chaotic city center, Indian and multinational corporate giants have pushed development outward, setting up headquarters in new suburban neighborhoods with names such as ‘Electronic City’. In these sanitized enclaves, gated residential communities offer ‘modern’ luxury living for expatriate families and upper-middle-class Indians. Although many of the women I interviewed used the ‘bubble’ metaphor, it was largely engaged to describe the expat families living in those gated communities – people who were chauffeured around by personal drivers in air-conditioned cars and mainly socialized with other expat families – and to differentiate that style of living from their own. Distinguishing their moves to India as being by choice, rather than being ‘sent’ by a company or accompanying a spouse, 5 they prioritized integration into the city as opposed to living in an enclave that ‘looks like Florida’. With choice as a mediating factor, challenges could be understood as adventures and opportunities for self-improvement, rather than as hardships to endure.
For example, Saaya (Japan), who came to India to become a certified yoga instructor and decided to stay, explained that she does not have much in common with the Japanese women she has met in Bangalore – women she says mainly came to India because their husbands’ jobs demanded it. As much as she might enjoy being able to speak Japanese sometimes, she did not feel like these women understand her daily concerns: They came here with the family … had to come. That’s not her choice. … Some of them are not happy… because of that. And then even if I get really irritated by my [working] life … I cannot just complain about it at the ladies gathering and then ask for agreement. They won’t [understand] because they don’t interact with the Indian locals other than maids or drivers.
For Saaya, and many interview participants, to avoid living in a bubble meant living in the urban, residential neighborhoods, working with and becoming friends with local people. To do so also meant managing one’s own transportation – whether that be walking, taking a scooter, or going by auto (three-wheeled motorized rickshaws piloted by drivers for less than 25 cents (in USD) per kilometer) – rather than being transported everywhere by a hired driver. Avoiding the bubble meant figuring out how to move around independently, and although each woman had become more comfortable over time, this comfort was won through becoming more familiar with the city and learning various mobility techniques, rather than discovering that initial concerns had been unfounded.
Mobility strategies
The women encountered here find themselves ‘out of place’ for many reasons: a complex urban landscape with an uneven infrastructure that is in every case less ‘developed’ than in their home countries; a society characterized by vast disparities in wealth, in which they must recognize their own immense privilege; social structures relating to caste and religion that are difficult for outsiders to comprehend; various affordances and limitations based on racial markers, which affect the experiences of the expats in differing ways; and more restrictions attached to being women than they are accustomed to, including assumptions that they ‘should be married by now’, which have social and bureaucratic import. 6 However, no matter what socio-economic class they were situated in at home, in Bangalore even those on local salaries find their economic capital buys access to maid services and, when needed, the use of a driver. This discussion of expat women’s mobility should be read with various power-geometries in mind.
Massey (1994) has argued that power over mobility does not just concern who can move and who cannot, but rather that it is about ‘power in relation to the flows and the movement’ with some people more in charge of their mobility than others; some initiating flows and movement, while others do not (p. 149). To appreciate differential power relations in this context, I distinguish between macro-mobility, to describe the cross-border movements of subjects, and micro-mobility, which refers to movements in everyday life. The focus here – on the challenges faced by single expat women in daily life – is very much on the micro-level. However, no matter what frustrations or problems they may encounter on a day-to-day basis, it is important to recall that each of these women, invested with macro-mobility, is free to leave at any time; indeed, each expressed that most likely they will eventually choose to do just that. For this reason, while the following emphasis on daily life may seem to pit the expat women against local gender conventions and infrastructural limitations in a struggle for movement, in the larger picture the purpose is not to critique Bangalore and the limits to mobility experienced there. Rather, the Bangalore case is useful to illustrate how strategies are employed to bring the affordances of macro-mobility into play at a smaller scale in which such mobility is limited – to demonstrate how, in learning how to retain and re-assert their independent mobility, the women reposition themselves in a central position of power geometry.
Getting around: transport tactics
Around the urban center, people mainly travel by auto. A foreigner with an obviously new-in-town demeanor must be prepared for a number of possible schemes that might provide income to an underpaid driver – anything from prolonged and circuitous journeys around the city, to being taken to a souvenir shop en route and being asked to spend ‘five, ten minutes, just looking’. For some women, a solution to the stress of getting around was found by procuring their own modes of transport, for others it involved gaining more familiarity with walking routes and communication tactics to use with the auto drivers. For all, developing a set of transportation strategies was key to being able to achieve a sense of integration, through which they could begin to have that ‘lived-in’ feeling in Bangalore.
Glenda (Austria) had chosen to live in a suburban compound on the recommendation of colleagues who assured her that it was the ‘safest’ and ‘most quiet’ option, but said her living arrangement made her feel ‘caged’. Between a hermetically sealed domestic space and a hired driver who took her around by private car, her life had few opportunities for the surprises or new discoveries that are supposed to accompany living abroad. The one ‘bit of freedom’ she said she had discovered was the small motor scooter she had recently purchased, which she happily noted was used to roam around her suburban neighborhood on the weekends. Flavia (Brazil) owned a scooter as well, and drove herself through the city to work everyday; this was not necessarily described as a safer option – indeed, she had already had a few minor accidents – but having her own means of transportation was a vehicle to independence. Betina (Germany) explained that after 1 year in India, she had finally managed to get through the logistical hoops to get a driver’s license and purchase a car, which gave her ‘back her independence’ and allowed her to explore India on the weekends. She proclaimed, ‘Now, I can roll completely on my own’.
I understood why someone would want to gain a modicum of control over transportation options. In my own experience, getting to an event or an interview was the most stressful part of this project. Learning how to negotiate with an auto driver to be taken directly to the desired destination is just one of the many mobility skills that must be learned, and interview participants almost always ended up using part of our time together to suggest strategies and give me advice on how to get around using the autos while I was in town. When not going too far, I preferred to walk, which at first I found a bit harrowing. A South-Indian friend had given me guidelines on what to wear to minimize ogling (loose-fitting cotton fabrics, higher necklines, arms mostly covered), and these clothing choices helped me to feel ‘appropriate’, but not necessarily relaxed. Although I saw many women (local and foreign) wearing knee-length skirts and V-neck or short-sleeved t-shirts, they were never walking alone. A lack of street signs contributed to the sense of vulnerability.
Although walking could be logistically difficult, it was a proud signifier of independence achieved, as expressed by Layla (US-PIO): I thought, coming to Bangalore, ‘I can’t go outside when it’s dark’; ‘I can’t be alone’; ‘I shouldn’t wear Western clothes or I’ll stand out’. So it took me awhile to get over that, to be able to navigate the streets.
Most insisted it was actually safe to walk in certain neighborhoods at night, as long as one dressed appropriately and messaged friends upon leaving and arrival. Yet, some appreciated they were defying convention, as did Jess, who declared, ‘I walk alone, [although] my Indian friends are not so keen that I do’.
I was often lost when walking and, in the age-old story of the clueless tourist, found many kind women willing to point me in the right direction. In one particularly frustrating moment, I stood on a small patch of dirt and garbage where a sidewalk had abruptly ended at a chaotic intersection during rush hour, wondering which direction to take; any choice would involve battling a long crossing that was far from pedestrian friendly, and I dreaded the thought of turning back to do it all again if I was wrong. Suddenly, it occurred to me to try Google Maps on my smartphone; I quickly turned on the phone, entered in the name of my hotel and, straining to hear over the clamor of traffic, was guided step-by-step to the front door. Such a ‘victory’ seems laughable in hindsight, but it was a turning point in my ease with conducting the research, and as it turned out, was a crucial technology to enabling the mobility of most all the women I met.
The ‘Game Changer’: technologies of location and movement
A deep appreciation for the assistance provided by Google Maps was almost universal among interview participants; Paige (US) called it a ‘total game changer’. One of the most frequently mentioned uses of Maps was as a tracking tool to be used when taking the autos. As Julia (Switzerland/Australia) explained, ‘it made a big difference for me to have a phone with Google Maps where at any time I know where I am and know I am not going to be taken for a ride’. Flavia used her mapping technology to make sure she was not being cheated for fare. Asserting that many auto drivers alter their meters, she made it a habit to ‘check how many kilometers it was’ on her phone, and ‘then just tell them I know it’s wrong’.
Most of the women were not concerned about altered fares, pointing to how little the drivers made in a day as the real unfairness, but did worry about safety; they used Google Maps to regain a sense of control, making up for their lack of knowledge about the intricate and unmarked streets. Paige explained the significance of the Maps for reclaiming her independence, a crucial step in her ability to feel comfortable in the city: When I first moved to India, I had an old school, green-faced Nokia phone that my boss let me use. I was so reliant on everybody else around me to know how to get places. So then I got a smartphone and downloaded Google Maps and it was like – now I feel like I can maneuver this city.
With mapping technology at her fingertips, she felt more comfortable using the autos: I think I had been here for three or two months before I had that [smartphone]. I just remembered the feeling of, ‘now I can feel safe to get in an auto and make sure he’s not taking me some crazy place’.
Although it is unclear whether there was any statistical reason for women to fear being physically harmed by an auto driver, a rape committed by a driver against a 19-year-old passenger had made national headlines about 6 months before my visit, and many local women have lodged complaints with the Auto Rickshaw Driver’s Union about pervasive intimidation and sexual harassment. 7 In any case, although Paige had heard rumors about auto drivers who will ‘take you to some dark alley or something’, the ability to know exactly where she was and where she was going had completely altered her fear. Other participants mentioned a surveillance tactic of making a driver feel he was being tracked, saying when taking an auto at night they might call a friend and make obvious mention of the driver’s posted license number.
Beyond anxieties about drivers, the simple fear of being lost initially curtailed movement for many of the women. Paige explained that the ability to locate herself and track her destination allowed her to feel safer in the environment, and gave her a newfound confidence to ‘go meet this person in this other neighborhood that I don’t know anything about’. I pointed out that many people say locative media have transformed what is it to be a traveler, and wondered if it was really any more empowering for women than for men. Paige said that in her opinion, it was: ‘I’m not sure why; I just feel we are more vulnerable on the street or something. You are really prepped to be nervous about being here, to be on guard all the time’.
The idea that women are ‘prepped’ to be nervous points to a possible gap between the perception of danger and discomfort felt on the street (which, as mentioned earlier, is by no means limited to foreign women) and an actual threat of physical violence. In fact, many participants pointed out that, while the vibe on the street is one where women must be on guard, Bangalore is actually a relatively safe city. Flavia voiced her appreciation that although people can clearly see she is relying on Google Maps with her phone and that she does not know where she is going, it has not been taken as an invitation to rob her. In Brazil, she said, she would not feel comfortable displaying her phone in public, as doing so would call attention to an expensive item, and, if she were in the midst of using it, she would be made vulnerable by showing a lack of attention to her surroundings and indicating she might not know where she was.
The mapping function of smartphones increases safety, both by providing logistical knowledge and by demonstrating that the user is plugged into a network. However, maps also enable and encourage independent mobility – allowing women to comfortably move around on their own, avoiding ‘the bubble’. Although new arrivals to most any city will find location technologies helpful in the process of getting to know their way around, in this context, technology rises to a level above ‘convenience’, to become empowering of mobility itself. Continuing to discuss how locative technology was a ‘game changer’, Paige explained, I feel so empowered right now to be out on my own in this city. It’s a totally different thing, because before I was so completely reliant on the kindness of strangers and these new people that I was meeting.
However, while achieving independent mobility was important to the women and the use of mapping technologies marked a turning point in narratives of settling in, most participants simultaneously acknowledged the significance of relying on others, explaining that life in India demanded a lot of dependency. Thus, tactics for independent mobility were coupled with efforts to build up a local network of support.
Networked independence
In a 2011 post on the blog, mybangalore.com, a list of ‘10 rules for expat life in Bangalore’ included the following two bits of advice: ‘Rule #1: Become a member of an expatriate club’ and ‘Rule #4: Do not enclose yourself in a community where you only deal with expats like you’. As contradictory as these two rules may seem, their incongruity nicely sums up the tensions faced by expats who want to avoid living in ‘a bubble’ yet find themselves seeking others who might understand the feelings of displacement that accompany living abroad. The need to find other people – to build up a network – turned out to be important not only for the emotional benefits provided by friendship (although this was key as well), but also for the simple management of everyday life. Over and over in interviews, people told me that Indian society was very much about groupness and dependency, and that one of the ways local people handle life in Bangalore is by relying on each other.
When Christine sought to gain international experience by working for her global corporation’s Indian subsidiary for 8 months, she had already spent a lot of time visiting India with her parents, who were from Calcutta. But this was different. In Bangalore, where she lived alone and did not have any family, she told me, ‘I very quickly started to realize I needed to kind of build a network of people’. She first tried to connect with colleagues, but found it difficult to take those relationships beyond the workday: I would basically go to lunch with some of the women from the office but during the evening it wasn’t necessarily something that I tried to push because I knew it wasn’t accepted. So … I joined Internations and the Bangalore Expat Club.
Everyone I interviewed expressed an interest in making friends with local people as part of their efforts to become at-home in the city, but some had found it difficult in that local female colleagues were often married and had to get home to their families right after work, or could not afford to go out very often, as many sent money home to their parents each month. Some had befriended male colleagues at first, but found that to work better in groups than one-on-one, where too many misunderstandings could occur. Most ended up building friendship circles that were a mix of foreigners and Indians, met through the cosmopolitan networks that served both locals and expats, such as Internations, the BEC and the Couchsurfing community.
The BEC is a party-focused club, meeting weekly in trendy bars around the urban center, where young expats mingle with the upper-middle-class demographic commonly referred to in the press as the ‘Fun, Young Bangalore Crowd’. It is impossible to talk to any Bangalore expats about the expat social scene without the name of BEC’s organizer, Viren, 8 coming up. Viren typically organizes two BEC parties a week – one a more relaxed pub gathering where, as Flavia puts it, ‘it’s just a bar and we can actually talk to each other and stuff’, and one a club night packed with dancing and drinking, with little opportunity for conversation. As Christine put it, ‘If you want to party, you go to Viren’s party, that’s just how it is’.
Although everyone knows about the BEC, they speak about the club with ambivalence, acknowledging its utility when they had first arrived in the city, needing friends, but deploring its ‘meat-market’ club atmosphere. As Saaya (Japan) explained, ‘People just get drunk, and then start flirting to each other – not like socializing, but just partying – and then after I come home, I have several numbers, but I feel very lonely’. Instead, Saaya found the local chapter of Internations to offer a more polite, conversation-based gathering, although she was disappointed that mainly men had reached out to her for friendship through the online forum: ‘Being a woman is quite tough on the Internet, because most of the time I’m receiving the messages from a male’.
Tired of her online expat profile being used mainly as a target for potential suitors, Julia (Australia) decided to proactively reach out to women, and used the local Couchsurfing forum to host a ‘ladies-only’ Sunday brunch. I joined one of these, and enjoyed a lively afternoon with about six women who, other than Julia, were all from Karnataka (the state of which Bangalore is capital) and represented a range of ages and social backgrounds. Relying on a network of women was new to Julia, and something she had developed only after coming to India. She explained, ‘this is the first time where I can see the value of girlfriends because the thing about mixing boys and girls is that … well, you know we are really not [seen as] equal’.
Many of the women have curated private networks that spun off from acquaintances made originally through the BEC, which they spoke of as a necessary evil – a mandatory if regrettable first step to meeting an accomplice for navigating the city and building up a new ‘family tree’, as Layla called it. The use of expat clubs to spin-off private networks was key. Layla explained that she met her best friend, Brad (US), at a BEC party, and once they became friends they decided to ditch that scene. Layla explained that with Brad at her side, ‘there were so many opportunities that opened up’, such as finally going to a restaurant she had wanted to try forever. Together, they set about broadening their network; they have now built up a group of friends made up of expats and locals, and use an email list to organize frequent gatherings. Similarly, Betina attempted to make friends with her colleagues at first, but it quickly became clear that those relationships would not grow beyond the office. She then joined a variety of meet-up groups focused on themes such as travel, photography, and going to restaurants. Eventually she made friends, who introduced her to more friends. Buoyed by these support systems, new options open up for the women to go out and move around the city.
Discussion/conclusion
In spite of their privileged mobilities at an international scale (they chose to move to India, and had the education, financial backing, and mobility savvy to make it happen), the women encountered here found their movements constrained at the local level. While this has much to do with the reality of Bangalore infrastructure and traffic – which play a role in limiting everyone’s ability to get around – conceptions of gender also regulated daily mobilities. In that they for the most part choose to live in local neighborhoods and build social circles that integrate local friends (albeit of a similar cosmopolitan class), and confront mobility limits through strategies based around transportation, technology and social networks, the women have endeavored to construct lives outside of an ‘expat bubble’ of suburban enclaves, country clubs, and personal drivers. However, armed with the means and know-how to access global technologies and networks that foster local mobilities, a different bubble forms around their digitally supported independence. Access to smartphone technology with data plans returns the women to a level of power that was temporarily at risk because of vulnerabilities at the street level: while they hold a peripheral position in the geometry of mobility in public space, it is worth recognizing they are ‘back’ at a central position of the power geometry when able to tap into locative networks.
Finally, while these women celebrate their incrementally won privileges to the street, it must be noted that global corporations are celebrating as well. Currently, the bulk of research emphasizing expat women as professionals (rather than spouses) is found in business and management journals, where a significant debate is whether they make ‘better’ expatriates than men. For example, Guthrie et al. (2003) find ‘women are dispositionally advantaged with respect to international assignments’ (p. 229, emphasis added), and Smith (2006) cites a human resources professor who explains women ‘are more likely to possess the essential characteristics of successful expatriates, such as flexibility, sensitivity, cultural empathy and understanding non-verbal cues’ (para 12, emphasis added). Based on such so-called essential characteristics, one survey noted, ‘Females in their late 20s are deemed to be “particularly suited” to overseas work’ (Dixon and Roberts, 2014: para 1).
As McRobbie (2007) notes, governments and corporations have moved beyond seeing young women as agents of reproduction, and are increasingly interested in their productive capacities – particularly in an environment where neoliberal reforms have dismantled the welfare state, putting the onus on each individual to create social and economic value. She asserts that the figure of the ‘girl’ is now interpellated as a ‘subject of capacity’ who ‘can be mobilized as the embodiment of the values of the new meritocracy’, which trumpets individualism and competition (pp. 721–722). At the same time, McRobbie points out, new constraints emerge as the cost of participation, such as that young women are entering the labor market in increasing numbers just at the moment when benefits to doing so are being undone.
Similarly, the growth of women in the expatriate labor force occurs at a time when international and global organizations are taking a more efficient approach to managing expatriate labor – increasingly hiring foreign workers on ‘local contracts’ (rather than the more lucrative and stable ‘expat contracts’), and specifically seeking out single people who are willing to migrate alone, saving organizations the expense of supporting a family in tow. In this individualistic, neoliberal scenario, single expat women rise to the challenge of figuring out how to manage their mobility and to do so across scales where gender norms may impose constraints on their presence and behavior in public. Yet, what might begin as coping mechanisms can easily become transformed into those ‘essential qualifications’ to staff expanding empires – empires that, with ever tightening economies of scale, will increasingly prioritize the worker who can go alone to the foreign land, be comfortable/flexible about her discomfort, use her own resources to figure out how to settle in, and rely on no one but her smartphone and networking skills to make her way. With this in mind, it is important to take seriously the building of an embodied politics around ‘elite mobilities’.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded with a Faculty Research Grant from the University of Denver.
Notes
Biographical note
Erika Polson (PhD, The Pennsylvania State University) is an assistant professor in the department of Media, Film & Journalism Studies at the University of Denver, and is the author of Privileged Mobilities: Professional Migration, Geo-Social Media, and a New Global Middle Class, forthcoming on Peter Lang. Her work has appeared in Media, Culture & Society, Communication, Culture & Critique, New Media & Society, and the International Communication Gazette, among others.