Demonising the cultural Other: Legitimising dehumanisation of foreign domestic helpers in the Hong Kong press

Migrantes como víctimas y héroes nacionales: cuestionando la migración como camino al desarrollo en Indonesia

“…Ello conlleva que sea promovida y mantenida por instituciones de migración internacional, Estados y ONG, a pesar de la evidencia de que la vida y el trabajo de muchos trabajadores migrantes son literalmente insostenibles e insoportables (Brennan 2014;Ladegaard 2013). …”

“…La bibliografía existente sobre esta dicotomía héroe-víctima se basa en gran medida en trabajadores migrantes de Indonesia (Ford 2002 (Ladegaard 2013;Mahdavi 2013; Yeoh y Huang 2010). Sin embargo, mi argumento es que el enfoque del Estado indonesio sobre la moral y la responsabilidad individual de los migrantes es una estrategia que concibe la migración como un camino hacia el desarrollo, haciendo que la explotación laboral aparezca como un efecto secundario inevitable.…”

Gendered Morality and Development Narratives: The Case of Female Labor Migration from Indonesia

“…While few, apart from Dannecker [47], Rachel Silvey [30], and Nicola Piper [41], have explicitly theorized or critically focused on development in their discussions, many scholars of gendered migration have argued that migration is a product of and reproduces structural inequalities within and between communities and nations, across the lines of gender, race, class, nationality, politics, and also religion [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33]49,50]. While there are critical voices against states who promote migration as a primary strategy of economic development, such as those articulating migrants as "agents" of development, these are often not as popular, publicized, or represented in mainstream media coverage of migration, development, and everyday migrant and labor activism in Indonesia.…”

“…Instead of asking how migration can better contribute to development, or how development programs can be reformed to include "well-being" [21,22], this article builds on ethnographers of gendered transnational migration [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31] to examine how migration as a development strategy, even if a "temporary" one, is taken for granted, promoted, and maintained by international migration institutions, states, and NGOs, despite compelling evidence that the lives and labor of many migrant workers are literally unsustainable and unbearable [32,33]. What kinds of lives, luxuries, forms of abuse and sacrifice, are being sustained in the name of development?…”

“…In Section 4, I demonstrate how the gendered and moral assumptions embedded in public representations of migrants as heroes of development are similarly evoked in Indonesian media accounts of female migrants as victims of abuse and exploitation. Further, I complicate the hero-victim dichotomy by considering the category of the "immoral victim", a category more familiar to and discussed in relation to media representations of migrants in countries where they work, such as Saudi Arabia [35], Hong Kong [32] and Singapore [36,37]. I then conclude with a discussion on the contribution of this article: an analysis of how gendered moral hierarchies embedded in these representations of migrants' success or victimhood potentially legitimize extreme violence against "immoral" migrants as deserved.…”