Qualified Brazilian migrant women in Dubai: constraints, agency, and change in the migratory process

Assuming the specificity of qualified women in migratory processes, the present work focuses on the migratory process of Brazilian women in Dubai (United Arab Emirates, UAE), exploring the extent to which women’s decisions regarding mobility are determined by structural constraints associated with the organization of labour markets, cultural models, and the family roles. In an alternative to this structuralist perspective, the chapter also aims to see the meaningfulness of the agency of women in migration and verify how (and if) this impacts on the processes of emancipation and empowerment.

The Brazilian emigrant women leave a country of continental scale, where economic, social, and cultural diversity is significant. Depending on the region of origin in Brazil, women have lower or higher education and are subject to different levels of patriarchal control that influence their condition in both the domestic sphere and the labour market. For its part, the context of the destination country (UAE), which is culturally and socially very different from Brazil, demands new tasks or functions and implies a multifaceted adaptation that requires integrating or accommodating to a new culture, learning a new language (or more than one), understanding or relearning the institutions that govern the social and work worlds, coexisting in schools, leisure, and even in religious temples, and readjusting to a framework where patriarchy is even more accentuated. All of this often results in a position of greater vulnerability than the one existing in the country of origin (King 2012). Furthermore, the identification of a group of women who leave active positions in the Brazilian labour market and undergo a traditional migratory process marked by family reunification linked to the almost exclusive role of family caregiver, contributes to accentuating their dependence.

After a brief theoretical–conceptual discussion about the migratory process of qualified women and its constraints, the empirical component of this chapter briefly presents the global migratory scenario of Brazilian women and explores the construction of the decision to migrate and the implementation of the migratory movement. These are related to the socio-spatial context of origin and the agency of the migrants themselves, considering motivations, options, and constraints in the family and professional domains.

Read the entire chapter in The Elgar Companion to Gender and Global Migration: Beyond Western Research at the Elgar Edward Publishing website

Writen by Raquel Nazário Motta, Marcos Linhares Goes, and Jorge Malheiros