The domestic residue: feminist mobility and space in Simryn Gill's art

Feminism, now nearly half a century old, is still fractured by two divisive forms – the desire to emancipate women from masculinist power structures, and the affirmation of woman's sexual difference. However, as Teresa de Lauretis and Gillian Rose argue, for feminism to remain relevant, it must also be attentive to the fluid hegemonic conditions of power, and thus, strive to evolve new ‘forms’, which emphasize feminism's political mobility. Developing this proposition, this article discusses how a new critical feminist mobility may be detected in the work of Sydney-based Malaysian artist Simryn Gill. Born in Singapore in 1959, and hailing from a migrant Punjabi family who first settled in Malaya in the 1920s, Gill constantly travels between her home in Sydney and her family bungalow in Port Dickson, a small coastal town in Malaysia. I will discuss how Gill's feminist perspective may be mapped through the artist's shifting spatial contexts by looking at three spaces – the gallery, the domestic interior and the tropics. Through these spaces, I will explore how the artist occupies the dual roles of ‘woman’ and ‘women’, thus demonstrating the changing and fluid energy of a mobile feminist stance. Gill's art valorizes the domestic sphere as a recurring theme with this subject being central to her self-definition in the public sphere. Yet, her treatment of domesticity is distinct in its furtiveness, a tactic, which I argue, enables a feminist agency that is politically mobile, and capable of engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, class and citizenship.     

The spatial dimension of agency: the everyday urban practices of Filipina domestic workers in Amman,Jordan

This article examines the strategies that Filipina migrant domestic workers in Jordan have developed to create new opportunities within the restrictive Kafala migration system. Based on short-term live-in contracts, the Kafala system tends to confine migrant women to employers’ homes, thus restricting their access to urban amenities and limiting their interactions with co-ethnics. However, Filipina migrant domestic workers transform temporary migration into a longer-term experience by increasing their knowledge of the city and going from live-in workers to live-out or freelance workers. This article contributes to understandings of migrant women’s agency by considering the spatial construction of agency in urban spaces. I argue that space and agency are entwined. In order to highlight the spatial dimension of agency, I use the concept of ‘regime of visibility’ to show how migrant women make their agency visible to others by accessing public spaces. Connecting agency with regimes of visibility allows me to question the place and role of migrant women in urban public spaces. Especially, I analyze that tensions in public spaces are not merely a reaction to the presence of women, but are also intended to prevent the visibility of individual agency.     

Moving stories: precarious work and multiple migrations

According to the United Nations over 3% of the global population or 232 million people currently live outside their country of birth. Their significance as a growing proportion of the labour force in many European countries is widely known. It is also evident that women – many of them young – are increasingly represented among economic migrants and asylum seekers. However, the longer term contribution of women, as migrants and as workers, is less well recorded. Here, I explore the connections between migration and employment, through the lens of oral histories undertaken with women who moved to the UK. Their life stories illustrate the growing diversity among female migrants as well as the changing nature of women’s employment. My key focus is, however, not on the work these women migrants undertook in the UK, but on precarious forms of waged work engaged in during the migration journey itself. I also reflect on oral history as a method and the problems of writing difference for feminist scholars working with and on women migrants.     

Ethics of care,emotional work,and collective action of solidarity: the Patronas in Mexico

In this paper, we examine the mobilization of the Patronas, a group of Mexican women who have fed thousands of Central American migrants over the past two decades. We argue that the Patronas’ work of feeding and caring for migrants goes beyond essentializing these women’s work as just housewives, mothers, and caregivers. Furthermore, we assert that through these care activities, the Patronas exert a feminist ethic of care that is understood as a set of practices based on trust, reciprocity, and solidarity. The Patronas’ praxis of caring for the migrants resonates with people and attracts hundreds of volunteers to join these women’s emotional and nurturing work leading these women and volunteers to participate in a political practice of solidarity. In this paper, we articulate three key findings: (1) the interplay between the Patronas’ emotional work and the ethics of care, (2) the emergence of a collective act of solidarity around the Patronas’ caring work that leads hundreds of volunteers to visit these women and join them, and (3) the kitchen as a place where the collective act of solidarity begins and where the Patronas experience their personal transformation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this study contributes to further our understanding of the interplay between Latin American women’s participation in social movements, emotional work in these movements, and the ethics of care.     

Migrant mothers,left-behind fathers: the negotiation of gender subjectivities in Indonesia and the Philippines

The distinct feminization of labour migration in Southeast Asia – particularly in the migration of breadwinning mothers as domestic and care workers in gender-segmented global labour markets – has altered care arrangements, gender roles and practices, as well as family relationships within the household significantly. Such changes were experienced by both the migrating women and other left-behind members of the family, particularly ‘substitute’ carers such as left-behind husbands. During the women’s absence from the home, householding strategies have to be reformulated when migrant women-as-mothers rewrite their roles (but often not their identities) through labour migration as productive workers who contribute to the well-being of their children via financial remittances and ‘long-distance mothering’, while left-behind fathers and/or other family members step up to assume some of the tasks vacated by the mother. Using both quantitative and qualitative interview material with returned migrants and left-behind household members in source communities in Indonesia and the Philippines experiencing considerable pressures from labour migration, this article explores how carework is redistributed in the migrant mother’s absence, and the ensuing implications on the gender roles of remaining family members, specifically left-behind fathers. It further examines how affected members of the household negotiate and respond to any changing gender ideologies brought about by the mother’s migration over time.     

Work intensifications,injuries and legal exclusions for paid domestic workers in Montréal,Québec

There is increasing research on the intensification of work in the post-1980s time period. The focus on flexibility in management practices has resulted in more tasks being offloaded onto workers who must then adjust their time-use to accommodate the greater workload. Studies of work intensification are not new to manufacturing production and there is increasing attention to unpaid domestic labour and service sectors. One industry, however, that has been neglected by these studies is paid domestic work where employers are individuals or families. Drawing on the traditions of feminist political economy and geography, I argue that the socio-spatial specificity of paid domestic work contributes an emphasis on workplace injury and labour law exclusion to intensification of work paradigms. Based on qualitative interviews conducted in Montréal, Québec from 2013 to 2015, I show how paid domestic workers intertwine narratives about work intensification and workplace injury yet remain excluded from the Act respecting occupational health and safety and the Workers’ Compensation Act in Québec. Migrant women caregivers are disproportionately impacted by these exclusions and I show how the Filipino Women’s Organization in Québec (PINAY) is at the forefront of challenging these exclusions. In conclusion, I propose an approach that combines feminist geography and political economy to consider how time-squeezes impacting individual or household employers may be intensifying the workloads of their paid domestic workers and how labour law structurally excludes workers along the social dimensions of gender, race and citizenship.     

Cross-border childcare strategies of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand

In discussing the challenges of cross-border childcare faced by migrant workers, most research focuses on ‘distance mothering’, assuming that children remain in the place of origin. In contrast, this article focuses on childcare at the place of destination in the context of migrant Burmese factory workers in Thailand. Since many of these workers are ‘undocumented’, they have few rights in their place of destination. This is especially problematic in the areas of reproductive health and childcare rights. Despite such obstacles, Burmese migrant workers strive to manage their childcare responsibilities by mobilizing whatever resources are available, as well as seeking to maximize the possibilities of citizenship and education rights for their children. According to our research, the specific strategies deployed vary according to the particular location in Thailand in which migrants are working. This study analyzes three locations in Thailand – one in the central Thailand, and the other two at the borderlands between Burma and Thailand. Through a feminist analysis of the ‘care diamond’, the study demonstrates how Burmese women migrant workers utilize the different migrant labor governance systems and porous international border as resources and opportunities to develop complex and changing strategies to juggle their childcare arrangements.     

Factory ‘nuns’: the ethnicization of migrant labor in the making of Tibetan carpets

Many debates over migrant labor politics in contemporary China rely upon essentialist notions of ethnic identity. In contrast, I identify migrant labor politics as transnational processes through which women migrants from rural Tibet become ethnic workers. Drawing on post-colonial theories of ethnicity and on feminist literature on global capitalism, this article analyzes the uses of migrant laborers in a globalizing Tibetan carpet industry. First, I investigate the making of Tibetan carpets and the essentialist construction of ‘carpet weavers’ employed by Tibetan–Nepalese carpet factory owners, carpet dealers in New York City, and various participants in Lhasa, including party cadres, international non-government organizations (NGOs), and overseas investors. I argue that the functioning of the international carpet business relies upon the ethnicization of migrant labor, in which labor subjugation involves creating ethnic subjects and ethnicized boundaries. This form of labor commodification is driven by both an economic logic and a moral imperative for preserving or regenerating ‘ethnic culture.’ Second, through the lens of gender, I look closely at the ethnicization of migrant labor in post-socialist Lhasa, analyzing its significance for the labor force in the carpet industry. The women carpet weavers, who mostly come from Tibet's rural areas, I found, strive to reconcile their desires for female autonomy with labor positions that reduce them to strangers in the city. Some women attempt to overcome their experiences of alienation while actively engaging in the reproduction of the patriarchal family as well as in labor hierarchies at work.     

Epilogue

This epilogue reflects on five questions raised by the papers in this collection. First, I ask ‘what are women's groups’. Second, I consider the centrality of Christianity in women's groups in colonial and contemporary epochs and review debates about how women's agency has been seen in becoming a Christian and in the perduring reality of Christian commitment. Third, I ponder the expansion of agendas from ‘welfare to empowerment’ and the proposition that even groups with conservative agendas can empower women. Fourth, I review the relation between self‐help and help from others and the associated issue of divergent local and global agendas. Fifth, I consider the differences between women grounded in age, rank, and class, highlighted by several authors. I caution against seeing such differences as irredeemable, irrevocable divisions. In conclusion, I pose the sensitive question of the relation between Western feminist scholars and the diversity of Melanesian women and espouse Teresia Teaiwa's value of Oceanic fluidarity rather than solidarity in coalitions of women.     

Liminality at work in Norwegian hotels

ABSTRACT

Hotels are spaces of temporary accommodation, but they are also important temporary spaces for an increasingly mobile and segmented workforce with different backgrounds and motives. In this paper we wish to address the temporary and transitional nature of hotel work by employing the term ‘liminality’. More specifically, we analyse the hotel as a liminal space for transient workers that view this work as a temporary endeavour. By drawing upon data from a study of hotel workers in Norway, we discuss how the liminality of hotel work may be understood. Here, we turn to an important debate within tourism studies on the blurring relationships between consumer and producer identities in resorts, often referred to in terms such as ‘working tourist’ or ‘migrant tourist-worker’. For a relatively privileged group of workers, the hotel becomes a space of liminal lifestyle pursuits as well as a space of work. We also contrast this privileged group with a different and less privileged liminal group of ‘expatriate workers’. Transient lifestyles and consumption of recreation among workers can have problematic effects in terms of reducing solidarity, and we wish to develop this further by investigating how worker representation and solidarity develops in liminal spaces of work. While strategies of liminality may have a transformative impact on the individual, their aggregate effects might simultaneously alter the way in which hospitality work is negotiated – from the collective to the individual level. As such, hotels as employers of working tourists pose a great challenge to collective representation, and may undermine effective worker action for less privileged groups of workers. The final section of this paper addresses this challenge, asking what bearings the individualism that dominates liminal work spaces has for trade unionism in the hospitality industry.     

‘In This Profession We Eat Dust’: Informal and Formal Solidarity among Women Urban Transportation Workers in Nepal

This article considers the working lives of women who drive electric rickshaws, known as tempos, in Kathmandu, Nepal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author examines drivers’ precarious working conditions and the strategies they use in an effort to secure better conditions and job security. This case study illuminates the particulars of women tempo drivers’ day-to-day experiences and also speaks to larger debates in feminist political economy surrounding women's entrance into the paid labour force, especially in South Asia. Women drivers provide a compelling example of how socio-economically disadvantaged women in industrializing and urbanizing cities of the global South find ways to create and protect spaces of dignified work and worker solidarity despite myriad challenges. Evidence from the research suggests that both informal and more formalized coping and resistance strategies are important mechanisms through which women seek to change the terms of their labour.     

Embodied cosmopolitanisms: the subjective mobility of migrants working in the global sex industry

Anti-trafficking rhetoric and policies emphasise the extent of exploitation and coercion of female migrant sex workers and obfuscate the shared ambivalences and contradictions experienced by migrant female sex workers and their male agents and partners. By engaging in the global sex industry, both young men and women negotiate their aspiration to cosmopolitan late modern lifestyles against the prevalence of essentialist patriarchal gender values and sexual mores at home. In the process, established gender normativities, legitimising women's subjection to men, are both reproduced and challenged. The evidence informing this article shows that a minority of women are coerced into the sex industry. There is a direct link between the adherence to essentialist gender/sexual roles and the recourse to violence and exploitation, because migrants' prolonged involvement in the sex industry coincides with the adherence to more cosmopolitan gender/sexual roles, translating into less authoritarian and violent discourses and practices. Hegemonic understandings of migrants' involvement in the global sex industry in terms of ‘trafficking’ erase these important dynamics and dimensions, which underpin intricate feelings and experiences of advantage, disadvantage and exploitation. By failing to engage with the meanings that migrants working in the sex industry ascribe to their working and personal lives, the (anti)trafficking logic of ‘humanitarian intervention’ enforces forms of solidarity and support that appeal to the minority and harm the majority of the people they are supposed to ‘rescue’.     

A geopolitics of migrant women,mobility and abortion access in the Republic of Ireland

Drawing on three select case studies and feminist engagements with mobility studies, I illustrate the Irish state’s use of a dialectic of gendered and racialized citizenship, and mobility and fixity, in the creation of ‘new geographies of belonging and exclusion’. Using detailed analyses from select cases, I argue for more nuanced feminist engagements with mobility that acknowledge and analyse ‘processes and trajectories’ in relation to a geopolitics of abortion – one that eschews undifferentiated uses of the category migrant and discourses of tourism, in analysing abortion in the Republic of Ireland. I expose how their use constructs limited ideas about gender, nation and Irishness to assure exclusions from Ireland, and from its diaspora.     

‘Shades of grey’: spaces in and beyond trafficking for Thai Women involved in commercial sexual labour in Sydney and Singapore

In this article I explore the migration trajectories of some Thai women trafficked internationally for commercial sexual exploitation, suggesting that many figuratively ‘cross the border’ between coerced and consensual existence in volatile migrant sex industries during the course of their migration experiences, thus complicating debates around the notion of choice in ‘sex’ trafficking. In exploring these women's transitions I seek to understand why women who had either never previously been sex workers or who were sex workers operating without duress, but who were then trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation remain in, or re-enter volatile forms of migrant sex work at a later point under voluntary arrangements. In answering this question I focus on the temporal and spatial aspects of individual women's experiences in migrant sex industries drawing in detail on the narratives of two Thai women trafficked to Sydney, Australia and Singapore. I make some suggestions about methodologies used in trafficking research that can assist in bringing to light some of these complex time–space dimensions of women's experiences through their shifting positions in commercial sexual labour. The article also reflects on the implications of these women's trajectories for the ‘prostitution debate’ as it relates to trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation by suggesting that many trafficked women occupy ambiguous or in-between positions in migrant sex industries, neither easily distinguishable by the label of victim of trafficking or migrant sex worker.     

Men and anti-violence initiatives: transnational feminist reflections from Afghanistan and Pakistan

Abstract

This article looks at how international development’s rhetoric for enlisting men to take up anti-violence against women’s work is translated into reality. Based on fieldwork conducted in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I argue that whilst there have been success stories of men’s behaviour changing, the localisation of gender concepts and ideas into local frameworks has not been as successful. Furthermore, inattention to how gender relations are shaped by conflict and violence results in the dilution of feminist values around work on violence against women. This inattention also privileges middle-class men’s activism at the expense of activism by women and men from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds. The article concludes with a call for further transnational feminist dialogue and interventions in the area of men’s involvement, so that current and future initiatives are critical, reflexive and relevant.     

Pushing the Boundaries of 1980s Feminism in a Northern English Town

During the 1980s, women youth workers in Wigan changed their male-orientated profession and communicated their feminist beliefs to young women in council estates. Through practical activities with young women feminism was lived rather than theorized, as they implemented the demands of the women’s liberation movement. A strong strand of personal development was woven throughout their work, driven by powerful emotion arising from the consciousness-raising process. After a decade of growth, cuts to local government services decimated the work with girls and young women. Notwithstanding their lasting reputation in the youth work profession, they were ultimately unrealistic about what was required to solidify, and therefore protect, their position within the council structure. The 1980s work with girls did, however, lay down a bedrock of practice which is acknowledged by youth work scholars to have filtered into mainstream youth work practice and training.     

Empowered spaces? Management articulations of gendered spaces in apparel factories in Karachi,Pakistan

Feminist scholarship has often focused on gendered workspaces within the apparel sector, where it is taken for granted that it is work conventionally attracting neophyte women. Within it, the task of managers is to discipline these young women to become docile and malleable workers. While this may have held to be the case temporally and regionally, South Asia’s experience has exhibited country-specific facets. This article focuses on these gendered workspaces in three factories in Karachi, Pakistan, in which we undertook research. In this context, there was a deliberate change in place facilitated by a United Nations Development Program’s Gender Promotion (GENPROM) initiative – to recruit and retain women workers, even though they acknowledged skilled workers were men. The factory managers we interviewed and spoke with used discursive tropes of gender equality and culturally appropriate women’s-only spaces as ways of justifying their labor recruitment strategy. However, digging deeper through interviews with managers at various levels suggested that their recruitment tactic had similar undertones to that revealed by early feminist research – although articulated via different mechanisms. We argue that this creation of empowerment spaces in particular Pakistani apparel sector factories requires careful tracing because it suggests how management interpellations reconfigure worker subjectivities. We also want to suggest that attentiveness to these practices is important because they may have specific bearings on temporal and spatial realities faced by Pakistan.     

Between diplomacy and solidarity: Western European support networks for Sandinista Nicaragua

Between the 1960s and 1980s, political crises in the Third World became a source of inspiration and action in Western European societies. The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was one of the most famous instigators of transnational activism. All over Western Europe, locally organised committees staged public actions, collected funds and educated their societies about the plight of this Central American nation, whose Marxist government faced strong international opposition from the Reagan administration as well as domestic social, political and economic turbulence. This article looks at Third World solidarity activism from a new perspective, assessing the active role of the Sandinista Liberation Front (FSLN) in the emergence and development of activism in Western Europe. It argues that FSLN diplomacy – initially by exiles and later by official diplomats – initiated the creation of transnational networks, driven by the quest for international support. They fuelled activism by providing activists with fresh information, contacts and avenues for action, but also cemented cross-border co-operation between activists and stimulated a ‘Europeanisation’ of local activism.