4 - The Happy Gurkha Housewife: Reproductive and Affective Labour in Global Security Households

Summary

I was really happy to become a Gurkha wife. We would have a good lifestyle, wouldn’t have financial problems, we would not have problems to fulfil the basic necessities of life like food and clothing. (Songita, May 2017, Nepalgunj, Nepal)

Spouses of security contractors and the labour they perform are almost completely absent from conversations around global labour and PMSCs. When Gurkha wives have entered into conversations, they have largely been understood as the grateful benefactors of a global security industry. Such an assumption assigns these women to the side-lines, unworthy of study. This logic pervades not only the global military and security markets, but also the broader global labour recruitment industry, and, indeed, has influenced our understanding of who are actually the workers, as well as the knowledge producers within global markets.

Wives are rarely treated as active stakeholders and agents in the broader circulation of global labour. This is an error. Such an overlooking of wives and families misses the ways in which global security regimes and markets continue to draw upon their emotional, affective and reproductive labour in order to exploit workforces. For example, Alison Howell’s (2015) work describes the emotional work military wives of US soldiers do as integral to making these (mostly men) resilient as soldiers. Saskia Stachowitsch and I have detailed how colonial histories within Nepal have fostered community life patterns around foreign military service, making the recruitment of Nepali men into the global security industry straightforward and almost pre-destined (see Chisholm and Stachowitsch 2016). In addition, Rashid’s (2020) Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army explores how mothers grieving over the loss of their sons are constructed by the Pakistani state as irrational and primitive in order to maintain the narrative of the patriotic soldier’s sacrifice for the state. Rashid’s (2021) work extends this analysis by illuminating how the family household and the female kin both continue to be feminised sites that must be disavowed and protected by the male soldier. Importantly, while central to how the Pakistan military functions, this process remains ambiguous and negotiated through intimate encounters between spouses of soldiers and soldiers themselves.