‘Just looking’: domestic workers' consumption practices and a latent geography of Beijing

The post-socialist Chinese city has been an important site to explore the formation of modernity in its everyday shape and manifestations. A common way of understanding urban experiences is through the prism of consumption. Rural migrants in the city cannot compare with urban residents in terms of their consumption level, but they are seen to be equally enthusiastic in partaking in consumption, and their identities are also believed to be (re)shaped by consumption practices. Drawing on several years' extensive ethnographic research in Beijing, this article suggests that these scenarios cannot adequately account for the diversity and complexity of rural migrants' experience in the consuming city. In this article, I put forward a methodological argument for considering the lived spatiality of ethnographic subjects in conceiving and considering consumption. Then, through an investigation of how migrant domestic workers use urban spaces, I consider the ‘dialectic of freedom and constraint’ which marks their agency and their individual choices and decisions. Finally, I explore the social production of space by considering migrant domestic workers' ‘subversive’ behaviours within rather than in opposition to the capitalist commercial logic and space. This discussion demonstrates that consumption practices are at the same time spatial practices, and despite the many obstacles and constraints, migrant domestic workers are actively availing themselves of the opportunities that the city has to offer. This creative process is crucial if we are to gain a new and more nuanced understanding of consumption as a social practice. I further argue that it is also a process by which rural migrants hold on to their sense of dignity and self-respect in an environment of exclusion and discrimination.     

Constructions of Filipina Migrant Entertainers

While international labor migration from South and South-east Asia has received a considerable amount of attention in academic circles, a feminist discourse is largely ignored. This ignorance is reflected in a dearth of materials on women labor migrants, as well as explicit considerations of gender. Discussions of Filipina migrant entertainers commonly emphasize poverty as the primary determinant of their movement. Evidence does suggest that unemployment in the Philippines has contributed to their search for overseas employment. However, this discourse has kept hidden other institutionalized forms of oppression that continuously and simultaneously affect Filipina migrant entertainers. In particular, the concrete realities of their gender, race, and nationality have been replaced by a reductionist overemphasis on economic factors. Through an examination of government and private institutions engaged in the recruitment, deployment, regulation, and protection of overseas contract workers, I identify and deconstruct four controlling images of Filipina migrant entertainers: the Other; the prostitute; the willing victim; and the heroine. I argue that these reflect the observer's intention, objectives, and motives in addressing the situation of Filipina migrant entertainers. Specifically, these representations of Filipina migrant entertainers have been socially constructed to rationalize and justify the existing material conditions encountered by the women. This analysis transcends more traditional migration studies that focus predominantly on a single factor- economics-to the exclusion of other interrelated aspects, such as gender, race, and nationality. The discussion addresses the epistemological foundations of how the migration of Filipina entertainers is contextualized.     

From home to city: gender segregation,homosociality and publicness in Istanbul

This article examines the complex and tangled relationships between home, city, and gender in Bagcilar, a municipality in Istanbul governed by Islamist-oriented political parties since 1992. Focusing on women’s spatial experiences at the intersection of the private and the public, the traditional and the modern, the secular and the religious, this article argues that home provides a medium through which gendered forms of governance and publicness are produced in the city. Home as a domestic sphere confines women’s roles to those of motherhood and wifehood, but also functions as a place of sociability for women. The municipality’s Islamic political discourse, combined with secular urban practices, mobilizes women through familial norms, gender-segregated events, and women-only sites in Bagcilar, where home and urban space are mutually constructed, regulated, and legitimized. Thus, women’s publicness, which derives from but goes beyond domesticity, also enables intimate same-sex sociality in urban spaces. Although this creates only conditional access to the city for women, their agency and engagement with the city emanate from such publicness.     

‘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.     

Racialised sexualities: the case of Filipina migrant workers in East Malaysia

In national narratives of ‘Malayness’, a specific language (Malay) and religion (Islam) have become key aspects of an identity that excludes migrants and those of ‘questionable’ sexualities. Consequently Filipina migrants working in the nightlife industries in East Malaysia have been subjected to disciplinary discourses of ethnicity and sexuality that underpin these national narratives. Attempts to tighten migration laws and curb nightlife activities have resulted in a racialisation of Filipina migrant sexualities. Using ethnographic methods, this article explains the impacts of dominant state and public discourses of migration, ethnicity and gender, which Filipinas encounter in their everyday lives in their destination country. In the process the article also reveals how Filipinas resist these discourses and hence participate in the formation of their subjectivity.     

‘Filial son’, the family and identity formation among male migrant workers in urban China

This article is based on an ethnographic study of life histories of 28 rural–urban (internal) migrant men located within southern China. It explores their narratives with a particular focus on changing social relations within the family, from the perspective of migrant sons. It argues that traditional gender norms, such as those attached to being a ‘filial son’, are lived out, albeit reworked, among Chinese male migrant workers across generations. The men recount the role of traditional familial gender norms, which are central cultural resources in forging their ‘dislocated’ identities within specific temporal and spatial conditions. For example, being a ‘filial son’ has become an important reference point for these mobile male workers to actively negotiate their emerging masculine identities in the process of negotiating urban lives, while living away from their rural homes. The article also explores a more complex understanding of rural–urban migration in terms of critically engaging with the men's well-being as urban workers.     

Transnational Organising and Feminist Politics of Difference and Solidarity: The Mobilisation of Domestic Workers in Hong Kong

Domestic work represents a significant share of global wage employment, but domestic workers – the majority of whom are women – remain to a large extent excluded from the scope of labour laws and, consequently, from the legal protection enjoyed by other workers. Since they work behind the closed doors of private homes, domestic workers are also shielded from public attention and are often hard to mobilise. In Hong Kong, women’s activism involving local and migrant domestic workers illuminates points of connection and distance as they are simultaneously privileged and marginalised along the hierarchies of class, ethnicity and nationality. Building on feminist and social movement scholarship, I illustrate how global frames facilitate our understanding of feminist solidarity among local and migrant domestic workers. I argue that the meanings of solidarity that dominate at any particular moment are not stable and enduring, but rather formed out of negotiation and struggle within and across domestic workers’ unions. This framing process involves these women working deliberately to make connections between global processes and local contexts.     

Care,pay, love: commodification and the spaces of live-in care

This paper investigates uses of the concept of commodification in contemporary analyses of waged care. Drawing on theoretical work on commodification and discourse-analytical research on private live-in care in Switzerland, I explore how Swiss live-in care questions central discussions in the literature. Scholars have focused on the ways in which care is embroiled within market relations and the adverse effects of commodification on the character and quality of care. The paper outlines the two central discussions, identifies important limitations and explores the ways in which Swiss live-care contests their underlying assumptions. Swiss live-in care exhibits intricate processes of waging elder care. Live-in care services are offered and arranged on agency websites while taking place at elderly persons’ private households. Elder care thus becomes entangled in market relations both in virtual spaces and at home. Furthermore, live-in care workers do not distance themselves from their work but actively seek to improve their conditions of work. In so doing, they complicate the assumption that paying for care corrupts caregiving or turns it into a product for sale. Based on this evidence from Swiss live-in care, I propose that a careful use of commodification might best serve feminist interventions.     

Places of difference: narratives of heart-felt warmth,ethnicisation, and female care-migrants in Swiss live-in care

Care for the elderly is a contemporary issue of multi-level, feminist concern. In Switzerland, private agencies offer so-called 24-h care services, for which they place or employ mobile women as live-in caregivers in private households. The larger discourse has debated care workers’ movements to Switzerland with much controversy. The article explores this interest in issues of mobility and place in an analysis of three central narratives within the larger discourse: care agencies’ ‘warmth’ discourse, scholarship’s uses of ‘ethnicisation’, and public discussions of ‘female care migrants’. Analysis of the narratives shows how care agencies ascribe care workers a particular ‘heart-felt warmth’ based on their so-called countries of origin. Scholarship’s reference to processes of ‘ethnicisation’ in live-in care illustrates a similar focus on care workers’ characteristics, nation-states, and nationalities. While the public discussion of care workers as ‘female care migrants’ frames care workers’ movements as a migration between discreet and distant places. The article argues that the ways in which the three narratives emphasise the places associated with care workers position these places in terms of difference. From a feminist perspective, this focus on difference is of underlying significance for the perpetuation of fundamental inequities in live-in care. In particular, the discursive differentiation between nation states serves to continually justify lower pay for workers associated with ‘other’ places. As such, the article’s analysis suggests that the discursive invocation of places of difference underlies the marked inequities in Swiss live-in care.     

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.     

HEALTH CONCERNS OF ‘INVISIBLE’1 CROSS-BORDER DOMESTIC MAIDS IN THAILAND

With the rising number of sex venues along the Thai–Burmese border and the perceived links between migration and the HIV epidemic, the Thai authorities and NGOs have begun concerning themselves with health problems of immigrant workers and seeking effective social welfare programmes for them. However, this paper argues that formal service programmes targeting specific groups may not be enough and notes a need to call attention to officially invisible migrants, particularly domestic maids from Burma who are more vulnerable precisely because they are ‘invisible’. The ‘maid trade’ from Burma to Thailand is statistically invisible firstly because domestic work is not recognized as a formal occupation either by the employers or the employees and therefore, they fail to be registered in census data. Burmese female domestic workers in Thailand are normally recruited through informal channels facilitated by regional trans-national networks that also engage in human smuggling. Domestic workers remain invisible in Thailand also because most of them are live-in and tend to work for one family for lengthy periods of time. They are normally out of reach of labour unions, religious organizations, non-governmental organizations and public health services. The fear of being caught as ‘illegal workers’ by the authorities further hinders their contact with the public. This paper also attributes the migrants’ invisibility to the tradition of ‘domestic servitude’ in Thai society. Using three detailed case studies, the paper demonstrates how the invisibility has contributed to the health vulnerability of these women in their daily lives.     

Space-time geography of female live-in child domestic workers in Dhaka,Bangladesh

Live-in child domestic workers in Bangladesh often experience the surveilling power of their employer's gaze as a Foucauldian panopticon, which both disciplines and engages children in forms of self-discipline. I argue that female child domestic workers in particular have a form of ‘thin’ agency whereby they are severely restricted in their abilities to make independent decisions or to act to their own benefit. I ethnographically unpack the concept of thin agency by analyzing material, cultural, spatial and discursive constraints that both employers and female child domestic workers engage in their daily lives.     

‘We or them,’ ‘you and I,’ and ‘I’: spaces of intimacy and (not so) public displays of affection in Hanoi

Through an exploratory study of romantic heterosexual couples in a public park situated in Hanoi’s outskirts, this article offers a conceptual rethinking of a western understanding of the park’s public/private dichotomy which can then be used to better appreciate how these categories are evolving in western urbanizing societies and their impacts on gender relations. By developing a relational, spatialized understanding of how young romantic couples justify their ‘transgressive’ displays of sexual intimacy in public spaces in contemporary urban Vietnam, this article focuses on how couples, especially women, manage their visibility. This analysis confronts the public civilizational discourse on Vietnamese sexual restraint by analyzing how young couples justify their romantic displays by creating an intimate space within a public environment. This space of visible intimacy is justified through their commitment to marriage. For the individuals involved in these romantic couples, visibility is justified, particularly for young women, through the enjoyment of a newly gained sexual autonomy as they migrate to the city.     

Negotiating gender dynamics in heteronormativity: extramarital intimacy among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea

This article examines the liminal space that exists both as a structural condition engendered by transnational migration and as a state that is self-consciously carved out by migrants. It demonstrates that this space provides the grounds for migrants to develop ‘deviant heterosexuality’, such as extramarital relationships while simultaneously causing dilemmas and contestation of gender dynamics in conjugal and familial relationships. Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, I elucidate the extramarital relationships among migrant Filipino workers in South Korea. By incorporating discussions of ‘queer heterosexualities’ and Hubbard's geographical engagement of sexuality into analysis, I argue that migrants' extramarital practices are shaped not only by dominant discourse, but also through the particular social and spatial positioning of individuals. First, I demonstrate that the liminal space gives migrant Filipino workers a certain degree of autonomy from the power and ideological interventions of both sending and host societies. Second, I highlight the liminal space that is extended by migrants themselves, especially through the increasing economic ability and mobility of migrant women, which can reconfigure the modes of heteronormativity and gender structure in conjugal, familial and extramarital relationships. In the end, I argue that transnational migration results not only in provisional liminality but also prolonged liminality through migrants' initiative in pursuing their desired heterosexuality and their endeavour to convert extramarital relationships into long-term intimacy. This study contributes to the discussion of the interplay between heterosexuality/heteronormativity and gender in recent human migration.     

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.     

Constructing Images,Constructing Policy: The case of Filipina migrant performing artists

In 1991 a Filipina performing artist died while working in Japan. Her death became an international incident and a catalyst for action on the issue of migrant exploitation. In particular, a series of policies was constructed by the Philippine Government in an attempt to afford protection to migrant workers. In this paper I critically examine the construction of these policies, with the purpose of identifying how specific notions of gender and sexuality are incorporated into the construction and reconstruction of policy. I demonstrate how the representation of exploitation within systems of labor migration serves the purposes of dominant factors of society, with little regard to the actual lived experiences of migrant workers. Findings indicate that current policy is based on an image that only illegally-deployed, hence immoral and disreputable women are exploited, overlooking the observation that both illegally- and legally-deployed women are susceptible to abuse. At one level this paper reflects an ontological attack against the employment of categories previously conceptualized as natural within the construction of migration policy. At a second level this paper is also concerned with the issue of 'who speaks for whom,' and the implications of this for viable protective policies. The significance of this paper extends beyond the confines of the Philippines, for it encompasses a growing international awareness of abuses toward migrants.     

‘I've had it with them!’ Younger migrant women's spatial practices of conformity and resistance

This article examines how younger migrant women from Turkey maneuver the public and private spaces of their everyday lives in a neighborhood in Germany, and how they challenge and affirm the patriarchal practices and gender norms that husbands, fathers, and older migrant women seek to impose within and outside private homes. Younger migrant women selectively comply with gendered and generational norms of veiling and dress, while at the same time also reworking gender roles, and avoiding and transgressing masculinist spaces. Younger migrant women's practices and spatial representations in mental maps reveal the complex entanglements of compliances and resistance, and dispel simple assumptions of being overwhelmingly victimized by their potentially violent men that are so prominent in contemporary Western societies.     

Terrace Dissent in Urban Western Sahara: Between Plazas and Homes

Since 2018, domestic Saharawi houses in occupied Western Sahara have become tactical sites for organising dissent. The move to interior spaces came as a collective retreat from the city's public plazas. This retreat from extravagant plazas illustrates that the turn toward interior spaces was a tactic in front of destructive occupation power rather than a withdrawal. This article explores Saharawi spatial production of dissent under two different political moments. I ask, what spaces of dissent do people under occupation animate when the city is mobilised against them? This paper is based on ethnographic engagement with encounters between Saharawis and Moroccan security forces that led Saharawis to construct the house as its own public. I demonstrate interiorising the exterior by analysing homes’ terraces as the new space of urban dissent in the Western Sahara. As such, the terrace appears as a new space and a new tool of and in urban insurgency.     

Defining dreams: young mothers’ agency in constructions of space

Understanding young mothers’ emic, or insiders’, spatial experiences is critical to realizing how their agency manifests in constructing and producing spaces, as opposed to common images of them as passive, vulnerable women living in deprived neighbourhoods. Set in the shrinking region of Parkstad Limburg in the Netherlands, this article draws on in-depth interviews and long-term participant observation in order to explore which modalities of agency emerge from young mothers’ spatial engagements with their neighbourhoods and homes. This article contributes to greater diversity and more agentic representations of young mothers than commonly perceived, and to a nuanced understanding of agency. The findings reveal that these women are continually navigating the social, physical and economic–political dimensions of space, from which four modalities of agency emerge: (1) ‘adhering to norms’, (2) ‘defining dreams’, (3) ‘challenging rules’ and (4) ‘considering options’. Contrary to understandings within a dominant independence-oriented discourse of agency as taking subversive action, this article shows that agency occurs in tacit, routine spatial practices, whilst navigating through individual circumstances and sociospatial structures and norms.