ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the equation between voice and power in household bargaining and global household models. The chapter challenges the equation between voice and empowerment that informs contemporary accounts of households, including global households, in gender and development. In the development policy literature, there has been increased reliance on the use of household bargaining models to make sense of women’s empowerment. These models privilege individual women’s access to resources as central to their “coming to voice,” and thus agency. In the feminist migration and global householding literature, there has also been an emphasis on migrant women as having increased voice and thus, agency in their households due to their control over resources, as well as their contact with the “modern” ideas of the receiving country regarding gender relations. These female migrant workers are often contrasted with the women “staying behind” in communities of origin who are seen as silenced, passive, and dependent. In this chapter, the authors challenge these binary framings of voice/silence and agency/oppression. They also explore some of the ways in which women deploy power through silence to better understand transnational household dynamics.
