The Indentured Mobility of Migrant Women: How Gendered Protectionist Laws Lead Filipina Hostesses to Forced Sexual Labor (original) (raw)

Maid or Madame: Filipina Migrant Workers and the Continuity of Domestic Labor

2003

This article examines the complexity of feminized domestic labor in the context of global migration. I view unpaid household labor and paid domestic work not as dichotomous categories but as structural continuities across the public and private spheres. Based on a qualitative study of Filipina migrant domestic workers in Taiwan, I demonstrate how women travel through the maid/madam boundary— housewives in home countries become breadwinners by doing domestic work overseas, and foreign maids turn into foreign brides. While migrant women sell their domestic labor in the market, they remain burdened with gendered responsibilities in their own families. Their simultaneous occupancy of paid and unpaid domestic labor is segmented into distinct spatial settings. I underscore women’s agency by presenting how they articulate their paid and unpaid domestic labor and bargain with the monetary and emotional value of their labor.

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

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2001

This article employs anti-essentialist Marxist analysis to shed light on the diverse economic activities that Filipina contract migrants are engaged in at home and overseas. We point to the limitations of dominant representations of these women as 'heroes' of national development or 'victims' of a global capitalist economy, which tend to foreclose a discussion of multiple class processes engendered by transnational labour migration. In drawing on a uid theory of class, we investigate how contract domestic workers are involved in multiple class processes that allow them to produce, appropriate and distribute surplus labour in innovative ways. We also discuss the activities of the Asian Migrant Centre, a non-governmental organization working with domestic workers in Hong Kong, whose efforts to inspire the entrepreneurial aspirations of these women re ect the importance of recognizing migrant workers' multiple economic identities. This analysis has implications for how we imagine the agency of contract workers, as well as the performativity of research and advocacy work.

Death and the Maid: Work, Violence, and the Filipina in the International Labor Market

Harvard Women’s Law Journal, 1995

This Article analyzes the Philippine and international legal frameworks for the protection of Filipina overseas domestic helpers from violence and the effectiveness of these measures. Though the Philippine government's actions do not seem insignificant on paper, violence against these women persists. This Article posits that the Philippine and international legal responses are ineffective. To date, such responses merely attempt to mitigate the violence against Filipina overseas workers. The root causes of violence run deeper than the problems addressed by Philippine policymakers because the very act of exporting labor contributes significantly to the perpetuation of violence against women.

Brides, Maids, and Prostitutes: Reflections on the Study of 'Trafficked' Women

Portal: journal of multidisciplinary international studies, 2006

My sincere thanks to Devleena Ghosh and Barbara Leigh for inviting me, Joseph Alter and Kevin Ming for their comments, S. Carole Vance for inspiring me to think about trafficking, and to the migrant women whose experiences have deeply influenced my view of the world. 2 There are a growing number of recent studies that criticize popular notions of trafficking, that do not blur boundaries or that do so in productive ways (e.g., Cheng 2002; and contributors to Piper & Roces 2003). Constable Brides, Maids and Prostitutes of a common phenomenon, one that can most simply be glossed as 'trafficked women.' My second and related concern has been-especially in the case of correspondence marriages-that some authors have focused on, or reproduced in their own work, simplistic stereotypes or an imagined fantasy of 'mail order brides' with relatively little attention paid to the variations in the circumstances, forms of introduction, and actual experiences of couples who have met through correspondence and eventually married. Therefore, before considering productive comparisons, it is important to carefully consider the variations within each 'category' of migrant woman, and the limitations of defining them as a category in the first place. My aim here is to reconsider some of the scholarly and popular depictions of so-called 'mail order brides' as 'trafficked' women; to question what I consider the warranted and unwarranted blurs that subtly or explicitly enter some of the scholarly and activist literature on 'mail order brides'; and to highlight heterogeneity in the experiences, circumstances, and expressions of agency of women who meet men through correspondence. The literature on sex workers has influenced my thinking about correspondence marriage, not because brides and sex workers are fundamentally alike, but because they are both subjects of the wider discourse on trafficking, women's agency, and women's victimization. I aim to highlight the weaknesses of a trafficking framework from an ethnographic perspective, and point to some of the ways that theoretical issues raised in the sex worker literature might apply to the study of correspondence marriages. 3 Despite important theoretical insights that can come from a combined discussion of sex workers, domestic workers, and foreign brides, and despite many similarly structured patterns of inequality, I urge caution. Women's emigration to rich countries Because migrant sex workers, maids, and correspondence brides often (but not always) 3 This essay draws from research I began in 1998 among women and men who met through correspondence and from research conducted among Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong in the early 1990s. Constable Brides, Maids and Prostitutes