Performances across Time and Space: Drama in the Global Households of Filipina Transmigrant Workers

Abstract

The separation of transnational domestic workers from their kinship households and their inclusion into new ones is a conflict situation that creates social drama. Contradictions in their positions in these two global households highlight this drama, for example, in their contrasting roles as breadwinners in one household and as domestic workers in the other, as transnational mothers and live‐in caregivers, and as international migrants and domestically confined workers. In this article, I employ Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical approach, particularly “contrived” and “real” performances, to examine the everyday performances of migrant workers across time and space, that is, vis‐à‐vis their contradictory roles as breadwinners in their left‐behind kinship households in the Philippines and as “maids” in their co‐residential global households in Singapore, over a period of time. I offer the time‐performance continuum loop as a context explaining the variations of domestic workers’ performances. This model captures the initial years of employment as overwhelming the migrants with hardships and poor performances whereas long‐term employment as equipping them with mastery in their performances. My research draws from conventional ethnographic fieldwork among Filipina domestic workers in Singapore, supplemented by a virtual ethnography in an online forum among Singapore employers.

The Role of Emotions in the Construction of Masculinity

“…Initially, these studies focused on stay-at-home women and the psychoemotional ramifications of their plight. Scholars (Arnado 2010; Dreby 2006; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Parreñas 2001; Sadiqi and Ennaji 2004; Salgado de Snyder 1993) have documented feelings of anguish, anxiety, depression, and guilt, and, sometimes, suicidal behavior among women as a result of their husbands’ migration. By the 1990s, however, women were analyzed not only as wives who had been left behind but also as migrants as a result of the high demand for women from the third world to supply the international reproductive labor division (Parreñas 2001).…”

A study on the information seeking behaviour of Singapore-based Filipino domestic workers

“…These FDWs are culturally termed as kasambahay (the Filipino vernacular for household help, which translates to a contraction of two words, namely, kasama for 'companion' and bahay for 'house') (Viajar 2011: 5). They partly comprise the Filipino workforce surplus, who were prompted to leave the Philippine boundaries to generally become the breadwinners of families left behind (Arnado 2010). Collectively, they form a band of OFWs who may be information-deprived and less technology savvy, but have the capacity to maximize online use to service their information needs, that cover varied areas inclusive of subsistence, rights protection, leisure, health and social security, employment, social and psychological support, government services, left behind families' welfare, and local events (Wang and Chen 2012).…”

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

“…Numerous studies of Southeast Asian domestic workers do, of course, point to the everyday acts of agency and resistance that workers engage in-a literature that counters the view that domestic workers are the voiceless victims of a patriarchal capitalist system (Yeoh and Huang, 1998;Arnado, 2010). As Rodriguez and Schwenken (2013, p. 376) suggest these resistances (presented in Scott's terms as 'hidden transcripts' (Scott, 1990)) 'point to the ways that there is overall contestation of the rise in temporary labour migration programmes'.…”