Beyond Heroes and Victims: Filipina Contract Migrants, Economic Activism and Class Transformations

Gibson, Katherine; Law, Lisa; McKay, Deirdre

doi:10.1080/14616740110078185

Cited by 130 publications

(95 citation statements)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…As Kunz (2010) argues, there is a persistent failure by International Financial Institutions to recognise how remittance flows are gendered beyond some rather dubious assertions concerning how women are more reliable (even 'rational') economic subjects who are more likely to remit a higher proportion of savings and, when they are 'left behind', are better able to manage household finances. States in Southeast Asia have tended to echo these 'heroic' narratives concerning women's contribution to remittance flows (Gibson Law and McKay, 2001)-a trope that tends to be reproduced within the domestic worker recruitment industry itself.…”

Section: Producing Migrant Domestic Work In Indonesia and Cambodiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Producing Migrant Domestic Work: Exploring the Everyday Political Economy of Malaysia's ‘Maid Shortage’

Elias

Louth

2016

Globalizations

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The article considers how the employment of domestic workers by middle class Malaysian households has been thrown into flux by the imposition of bans on the sending of workers by states such as Indonesia and Cambodia, as well as the decline in numbers of women seeking employment as domestic workers in Malaysia and rising employment costs. This article does not seek to focus on the high-level policy negotiations and disputes that have come to characterize systems of temporary return migration for domestic work in Asia, but to focus in on the everyday political economies (of social reproduction, work and everyday agency) that constitute the conditions of possibility within which bilateral disputes and labour agreements between Southeast Asian states take shape. We examine three dimensions of migration for domestic work in Southeast Asia in ways that bring together literatures on everyday life and social reproduction. These interconnected yet distinct dimensions are (a) the relationship between strategies to boost remittances and flows of workers from some of the most impoverished parts of Southeast Asia; (b) the centrality of low cost migrant domestic workers to Malaysian middle class 'success stories', and (c) the day to day production of 'good' worker subjects -a process that is actively and constantly resisted by workers themselves. Through a focus on these dimensions, the article provides important insights into the mechanisms through arenas of everyday life -and the household in particular -are transformed; becoming sites for the ever widening and deepening of the market economy.

show abstract

Section: Producing Migrant Domestic Work In Indonesia and Cambodiamentioning

confidence: 99%

Producing Migrant Domestic Work: Exploring the Everyday Political Economy of Malaysia's ‘Maid Shortage’

Elias

Louth

2016

Globalizations

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…By focusing on the process of migration, we can better map out how class 'becomes articulated in unexpected and sometimes contradictory ways when viewed through a transnational frame' (Kelly 2012, 155). Telling examples of such transnational classed articulations can be found in a set of research on Filipino migrants who experience multiple, complex and often contradictory changes in class (intersecting with gender, age, human capital) positions through migration (Gibson, Law, and McKay 2001;Kelly 2012;Lutz 2010;Parreñas 2001;Shinozaki 2005). These processes result in what Parreñas (2001) calls 'contradictory class mobility' that denotes the simultaneous experience of upward mobility (in financial status) and downward mobility (in social status).…”

Section: Migration Academic Mobility and Classmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social Mobility via academic mobility: reconfigurations in class and gender identities among Asian scholars in the global north

Leung

2017

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Geographic mobility is increasingly perceived worldwide as a key to academic excellence, career advancement and upward social mobility. Drawing on long-term qualitative fieldwork data, this paper interrogates the impact of academic mobility in reconfiguring class and gender identities among students, early professionals and their families from Hong Kong and Indonesia who have studied or received further training in Germany, the Netherlands and the USA. This analysis problematises the crude 'academic mobility → upward social mobility' formula and considers international academic mobility as a contextual, dynamic and multi-directional process. Through this process social positions and identities of the moving individuals and families are negotiated in an on-going manner as migrants insert into, depart from and re-insert into the various social milieus where their mobility trajectories touch ground. Narratives of interviewees illustrate the complexity and contradictions in class and gender configurations as students move across borders. They show how these individuals are inserted in contrasting social positionings, and experience how a particular social class or gender position carries different connotations. The paper concludes with a few conceptual and methodological reflections.

show abstract

“…The remittances sent by women working abroad are not only invested in new crops but also in land in areas outside Ifugao sending communities (see Gibson et al, 2001). The value of labour abroad means migrant women are the 'new heroines' of the Philippine economy and their families at home (Gibson et al, 2001).…”

Section: Transitions In Land-use and Local Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The value of labour abroad means migrant women are the 'new heroines' of the Philippine economy and their families at home (Gibson et al, 2001). Sending households receiving regular flows of cash are the envy of their struggling neighbours.…”

Section: Transitions In Land-use and Local Identitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading remittance landscapes: Female migration and agricultural transition in the Philippines

McKay

2005

Geografisk Tidsskrift-Danish Journal of Geography

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the Philippines, female migration for overseas contract work is transforming local agricultural landscapes. Yet the changes in land, labour, crops and cropping patterns that are occurring may not reflect local ecology or economic opportunity as much as they represent gendered versions of local modernity, envisioned at a new global scale. This study links local agricultural change to local interests in global migration and reads local landscapes as reflecting those links.Drawing on interviews and observations from a case study of a community in the northern Philippine province of Ifugao, this paper suggests how women's migration is both a cause and a result of a transition from subsistence to commercial agriculture. Migrating for waged work overseas, women withdraw their labour and knowledge from agriculture. At 2 home, solo fathers usually choose to plant new, in-put intensive crops with the cash remittances they receive from their absent wives. Men's interests in 'modern' commercial crops may overdetermine their wives' preferences for more secure and ecologically sustainable cropping patterns. Tracing migrants' remittances into investment in crops and labour, the analysis ties female migration to household land-use decisions, suggesting how such decisions may undermine or enhance long-term agricultural sustainability.

show abstract

Beyond Heroes and Victims: Filipina Contract Migrants, Economic Activism and Class Transformations

Cited by 130 publications

References 3 publications

Producing Migrant Domestic Work: Exploring the Everyday Political Economy of Malaysia's ‘Maid Shortage’

Producing Migrant Domestic Work: Exploring the Everyday Political Economy of Malaysia's ‘Maid Shortage’

Social Mobility via academic mobility: reconfigurations in class and gender identities among Asian scholars in the global north

Reading remittance landscapes: Female migration and agricultural transition in the Philippines

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About