Domestic Work Abroad

Drawing on an analysis of in‐depth interviews with returned migrant women from East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, this paper considers the links between migration, religious beliefs and subjectivity. Low‐skilled migrant women, including domestic workers, have often been represented as marginalised. This paper argues that in the context of migration, women constantly move through trajectories of power using religion as a spiritual resource. Against the commonly patriarchal characteristics of their religion and community, the women employ cognitive strategies to face challenges in migration. In each stage of their transnational migration, the women's experiences reveal the multitude of ways in which they continue to invest in their beliefs through everyday practices, rituals and networking. These experiences highlight the women's strategies in accessing different forms of power. This study demonstrates the significance of focusing on these women's experiences, including their everyday religious practices and their shifting sense of self, as a way of broadening the conceptual basis of our understanding of female migration.

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'Knowing one's place': gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity in Eastern Indonesia

Williams

2005

Global Networks

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In this article I analyse the gendered space of transnational mobility by problematizing migrant subjectivity in everyday practices. In line with feminist perspectives I highlight the significance of the micro‐scale experience of female migrants from Eastern Indonesia in acquiring mobility as a struggle for new subjectivity. I frame this migration as a production of the subjective space of power. Based on in‐depth interviews with returned migrants, I present reflexive accounts of two migrants on contract domestic work abroad to illuminate the changing contours of the relationships between gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity. Households take into account the cultural meanings of space in everyday life including local relations in the decisions on mobility. Strategies of ‘knowing one's place’ reflect women's agency in negotiating alternative roles and positions within the intra‐household dynamics and in the workplace. Women's personal accounts have the potential to illuminate spatial processes of migration as a contested space for the repositioning of self in networks of family, kin, local and global relations.

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Domestic Work Abroad

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Female transnational migration, religion and subjectivity: The case of Indonesian domestic workers

'Knowing one's place': gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity in Eastern Indonesia

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