Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives by Pardis Mahdavi (review)

While conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Qatar, I engaged in many conversations with migrants working in service sectors of the country. One exchange stands out in my memory. While attending a majlis gathering of women in an upper-class Qatari family, I walked into the courtyard to get some fresh air with my one and a half year old daughter. I wandered over to a swing set with her and encountered one of the house maids on a break from cooking and cleaning. We quickly exchanged our national origins in Arabic (she was Sudanese, I was Bengali-American) and she informed me that one of her relatives had immigrated to the US and was now running a successful car rental company in New Jersey. She told me about the struggles she faced as a domestic servant in a Qatari household: the long hours, the lack of respect, the low pay, and the limited social and physical mobility in Qatar. Then, like many migrants I met, she asked me whether I could help her migrate to the US. I informed her, that sadly, I didn't have that type of power.

I was perplexed by similar conversations with migrants working in retail, construction, and cleaning regarding the distinctive pathways that bring people to the Gulf countries as migrant workers. And I was curious about how Gulf States define the boundaries of migrant labor, citizenship status, and migrant rights. Pardis Mahdavi's Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives is a compelling ethnographic exploration of these very questions, with a specific focus on the intimate subjectivities she argues are at the core of migrant journeys to the Gulf. To make the argument for privileging the intimate lives of migrants, Mahdavi challenges the human trafficking framework that categorizes migrants primarily by the labor they perform. Instead, Mahdavi wants "to look beyond the question of intimate labor and rather to emphasize the intimate lives of laborers" (32). Mahdavi begins to make this case in the prologue, where she describes connecting with Noor, a middle-class Iranian migrant who moved to Dubai because of marriage and stayed because of her son, who has an Emirati father that won't come forward to claim paternity and give custody to Noor. Noor's migration is troubling and inspiring for Mahdavi because of her own struggles gaining custody of her daughter, which she describes in the prologue as important in organizing her thoughts on migration:

I was frustrated by my own immobility, but I increasingly thought about how people are bound by love for their children, parents, or families. I came to see how people may choose mobility for the same reasons they choose immobility.

(5)

Mahdavi describes this as a theory of im/mobility that illustrates "the mutually transformative effects of migration on the state, as well as on migrant subjectivities" (15). To demonstrate the concept of im/mobility, Mahdavi uses interviews with a diverse array of migrants who make choices to migrate or stay in the Gulf because of family ties. The book shares stories of migrant mothers and their newborn children awaiting trial and possible separation (Chapter 2), children of migrants seeking reunification with their parents (Chapter 3), migrant workers who are able to explore their sexuality in the Gulf (Chapter 4), children of migrants who grow up in orphanages in the Gulf with no clue as to their parentage (Chapter 5), and migrant workers and Gulf citizens who have become activists as a result of their personal encounters (Chapter 6). The book's strength lies in each chapter's compelling vignettes about migrants whose love lives and family obligations brought them to the Gulf States, but whose fortunes are complicated by messy encounters with new families, other migrants, and legal rules they often do not understand. But the book's central strength is also the source of its major weakness. In collapsing different types of migrant labor to focus on "intimate lives," Mahdavi loses the clarity...