ABSTRACT
Murugan was the first to respond to the posters I had put up around the working-class streets of Deira, in the area close to what is known as the ‘Tamil Bazaar’. They asked for the low-wage men living in the area to share their experiences of living and working in Dubai. Rather naïvely, I had also stated on the posters that I would be happy to have conversations over a drink or meal, for which I would pay. In my very first conversation with Murugan, a day labourer from Tamil Nadu, he very indignantly informed me that he would willingly speak with me about his life in the emirate, but in very clear terms said that he did not need anything in return. ‘We can buy our own drinks and food. In fact, I will buy you a drink for helping us tell our story to everyone.’ I quickly realised that my offer to pay for a meal was probably offensive to the gendered norms of conduct and sense of self-sufficiency that Murugan and other men like him subscribed to. Although Murugan and other informants were quick to emphasise narratives about abusive employers and unscrupulous agents, in interactions and conversations they also sought to foreground their independence by paying for our meals, walking me to my bus stop and offering advice on the dangers of street life in Dubai. Everyday enactments of paternalism and agency to researchers like myself, family back home, employers, as well as to one another, emerged as significant ways in which low-wage migrant men reclaimed respect within a space where they were typically seen only as economic agents devoid of any other need except to accumulate capital. This chapter unpacks such narratives of neoliberal selfhood through foregrounding the development of ‘emergent’ masculine subjectivities (Inhorn and Wentzell, 2011) and in doing so challenges oversimplified representations of low-wage migrants in highly stratified contexts.
