Temporal emotion work, gender and aspirations of left-behind youth in Indonesian migrant-sending villages

Abstract

This paper explores the temporalities and emotions of youth left-behind by migrant parents by using Jennifer Lois’ temporal emotion work as an analytical lens to foreground youth’s management of conflicting feelings by reworking particular experiences of time. We extend Lois’ concepts of ‘sequencing’ (strategic ordering of emotions and time) and ‘savouring’ (intentional maximizing of specific times) to include a contextualized, gendered angle, while also engaging with the additional concept of ‘supressing’. The work draws on qualitative interviews conducted in 2017 with left-behind youth from migrant households from rural migrant-sending villages in two districts in Java, Indonesia. By highlighting youth’s shifting temporal emotions and how aspirations and experiences of left-behindness are affected, our research reveals gendered strategies of temporal emotion work. Young women enact ‘sequencing’ and ‘savouring’, aspiring to stay as a means of restorative, temporal-emotional justice for their families. Conversely, young men are more inclined to enact the ‘suppressing’ of emotions while aspiring for migration. Among a generation that has grown up in the wake of parental migration, most youth conform to traditional gendered scripts within an older culture of masculinized circular migration.