Indian Women as Nurses and Domestic Workers in the Middle East A feminist perspective NILANJANA RAY Migration is a gendered process. Who goes, why goes, where goes, the experience in the destination country, and impact on family relations are all embedded in social norms and gender relations. Economic theories of migration pointing to structuralist forces have identified wage differentials across geographic regions, core and periphery relationship of former colonizers with their former colonies and the dual nature of valued and devalued work of the receiving economy as the causes of population mobility across borders (Todaro 1970; Wallerstein 1974; Piore 1979). Another group of functionalist theories believe that micro processes interacting with the individual, the family and the community are initiators of migration. They believe that migration is a rational choice made by an individual to maximize profits or gains (Todaro 1969). Some shift the focus from individual agency to family interdependence and term migration as a family risk diversion strategy (Stark 1991). Other theorists postulate that migration occurs out of a community following the networks created by the diaspora (Massey 1992). All these theories are gender neutral. They assume that the same forces propel men and women and shape their experiences in a similar manner. This assumption is challenged by feminist migration research that postulates that gender is a system of power relations that permeates all social and economic institutions. Therefore, men and women move under different compulsions, in the context of differential opportunities and experience dissimilar constraints upon their agency. Here, I present the feminist lens of migration research by applying it to two streams of women’s migration from the state of Kerala to the Gulf region viz. the mobility of Nurses and Domestic Workers. The next section describes the essence of the feminist lens and the aspects of women’s migration that have been explored. Section three deconstructs the narratives of Indian nurse migration that is extant in the literature. Similarly, section four deconstructs the narratives of domestic worker migration from extant literature. Section five compares the two narratives, and finally section six suggests potential areas for future research. The Feminist Lens of Migration Research Gender analysis of migration focuses on gendered systems of inequality in households, labour markets and cultures that influence women’s migration (Morokvasic 1984) and presents how gender relations impact as well as are impacted by migration. Firstly, feminist theorizing explains why some women migrate while others do not by connecting normative gender expectations to macro structural forces and individual agency. At the very outset, opportunities and constraints for men and women in their home country are gendered and dissimilar. Girls’ education is given low priority when scarce resources have to be allocated among children,