Migrant Encounters: Intimate Labor, the State, and Mobility Across Asia - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 081224754X ISBN 13: 9780812247541

Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Migrant Encounters examines what happens when migrants across Asia encounter both the restrictions and opportunities presented by state actors and policies, some that leave deep marks on migrants' own life trajectories and others that produce fragmentary, uneven traces. With a focus on those who migrate to perform intimate labor—domestic, care, and sex work—or whose own intimate and familial lives are redefined through migration, marriage, and sometimes parenthood, this volume argues that such encounters transform both migrants and the states between which they move.

Written by an international group of anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, these essays offer richly detailed and insightful accounts of the intimate consequences of migration and the transformative effects of migrant-state encounters across Asia. Addressing a range of topics from the fate of children born to unmarried migrant mothers to the everyday negotiations of cross-border couples and migrant domestic workers, the contributors situate themselves at various points along the extensive migration routes that extend from northeast Asia all the way to the Gulf region. The authors draw on ethnographic research and policy analysis to illustrate the texture of migrants' interactions with state actors and forces. From a range of perspectives, they explore what these encounters teach us about migrant agency and the workings of state power in a region now rife with diverse forms of cross-border mobility.

Contributors: Heng Leng Chee, Nicole Constable, Sara L. Friedman, Hsiao-Chuan Hsia, Mark Johnson, Hyun Mee Kim, Pardis Mahdavi, Filippo Osella, Nobue Suzuki, Christoph Wilcke, Brenda S. A. Yeoh.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sara L. Friedman is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University. She is author of Exceptional States: Chinese Immigrants and Taiwanese Sovereignty and coeditor of Wives, Husbands, and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China. Pardis Mahdavi is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Pomona College. She is author of Gridlock: Labor, Migration and Human Trafficking in Dubai and From Trafficking to Terror: Constructing a Global Social Problem.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction
Migrant Encounters
Sara L. Friedman and Pardis Mahdavi

"I never thought being an overseas Filipino worker (OFW) would be like this; I always imagined it would be, I don't know, maybe more nice, less painful," recalled Benita, a young woman from Cavite, Philippines, who migrated to Dubai through informal channels in 2007 to work as a nanny. Faced with an abusive employer who failed to pay her wages, uncertain of her visa status, and desperate to earn money to support her family, Benita ran away from her employer a mere four months after arriving in Dubai and found work as a hostess in an underground bar, occasionally engaging in sex work on the side. Benita's migration path skirted the boundaries of legally sanctioned routes and ultimately led her to informal employment in entertainment and sex work. Her migration trajectory was shaped by sending and receiving government policies, the interests of diverse state actors and employers, and her own migration needs and desires.

This volume examines what happens when migrants such as Benita encounter both the restrictions and opportunities presented by state actors and policies, some of which leave deep marks on migrants' own life paths and others which produce fragmentary, uneven traces. Our authors argue that such encounters transform both migrants themselves and the various states they move among, although often in unpredictable ways. These transformations may generate new forms of agency and subjectivity for migrants, as well as new state policies and governing capacities designed to manage increasing migratory flows or to respond to international human rights pressures. Viewing these encounters as productive processes, the chapters to follow document migrants' creative responses to government regulations and the often contradictory ways these responses may be integrated into evolving migration regimes.

Our authors organize their discussions around two analytic frames. The first addresses how migratory labor across Asia has transformed intimate relationships and the provision of care through explicitly racialized, gendered, and sexualized framings of cross-border mobility. Some authors ask how migration produces new modes of intimacy and sexual expression both at home and abroad, while others utilize the framework of "intimate labor" (Boris and Parreñas 2010) to interrogate how migrants are deemed suitable to perform devalued labors of care and intimacy that support domains of life otherwise identified as critical to the health and welfare of national populations: family, sexuality, and reproduction in its broadest sense. Adopting Viviana Zelizer's (2005) "connected lives" approach, the authors trace the interconnections between social and economic mobility and the lives of both migrants and those with whom they work and form families. Assuming that intimacy is understood and enacted through culturally and socially specific values, relationships, and practices, we ask how cross-border intimate labor transforms care, bodily contact, affect, desire, and morality. Both in their explicitly commodified roles as domestic workers, nannies, and sex workers and as wives and mothers, migrants reconfigure the meaning of intimate engagements and the embodied forms through which intimacy is expressed. Put simply, migrant intimacies create new possibilities for interpersonal relationships, sexual desires, and gendered domesticity. At the same time, these cross-border intimacies provoke new modes of state power as governments struggle to regulate the intimate lives of migrants and citizens alike (Boehm 2012).

The second analytical lens utilized by our authors focuses on encounters between migrants and the state across Asia specifically. In her recent study of "cosmopolitan sex workers," Christine Chin describes global circuits and syndicates across Asia through which flexible citizens and capital flow from one cosmopolitan capital to another. Chin argues, and we agree, that these "cosmopolitan/global circuits," which include megacities such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Dubai, have become migratory destinations for the elite and those who serve them (Chin 2013). Throughout this volume, we focus on Asia as a series of emerging cosmopolitan locales that play host to an ever-moving turnstile of migrants of varying backgrounds. As their populations expand to encapsulate "global talent," these countries necessarily must adapt to the changing demographics of their cityscapes.

Situating themselves at various points along the extensive migration routes that extend from northeast Asia all the way to the Gulf region, our authors draw on ethnographic research and policy analysis to illustrate the detailed texture of migrants' interactions with state actors and forces. Beginning from different perspectives, they ask what these encounters teach us about migrant agency and the workings of state power in a region now rife with diverse forms of cross-border mobility: for instance, when returned working-class migrants in Kerala confront state and upper class/caste discourses about failed migrant social reproduction and sexual immorality, when single Filipina migrant mothers in Japan go to court to claim citizenship for their mixed-heritage children, or when a foreign domestic worker in Singapore struggles with a bureaucracy intent on preventing her from switching her status to that of wife of a citizen. Precisely because many intra-Asian migration trajectories involve the work of intimacy in some form, they provide a valuable starting point for analyzing new modes of gendered and racialized intimacy emerging through cross-border mobility and the diverse forms of state power that both shape and respond to these intimate practices.

Taken as a whole, this volume brings these two foci together to illustrate the productive and at times perverse dance engaged in by migrants and state actors as they move in and out of various intimate settings and relationships across Asia. Although states strive to fix migrants in specific categories, migrants challenge those very goals of fixity and singularity as they shift between roles and among spheres of caretaking, sexual, and emotional labor with their inherently flexible boundaries. The fluidity of state-migrant encounters generates an array of figures who populate the interstices of national societies and who undermine state efforts to define clear parameters of legality and legitimacy: for instance, runaway domestic workers, commodified migrant wives, transgressive sex workers, unmarried mothers, and children of uncertain parentage. Our authors follow these figures through cycles of interaction with state actors, citizens, migrant networks, and home communities to show how intimate labor migrations produce unpredictable policy consequences, new modes of intimacy, and alternative frameworks for assessing migrants' claims to presence, rights, and citizenship.

Encountering the State

When Benita first sought overseas employment in 2007, she faced multiple restrictions and delays imposed by protectionist policies recently implemented by the government of the Philippines. Economic pressures to support her family forced Benita to seek out an alternative route that led to her vulnerable migration status in Dubai. After fleeing her abusive employer and working in the informal entertainment sector for several years, Benita was able to return home in 2012 during a state-mandated period of amnesty in Dubai for all migrants without working papers. She had been waiting for her chance, talking informally with employees of the Philippines embassy who frequented the bar where she worked each evening, and planning her return home. With their help and the amnesty period, Benita was reunited with her family and brought home enough money to build a house for her mother and daughters.

Benita's experiences...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 081224754X
• ISBN 13: 9780812247541
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Herausgeber: Friedman Sara L., Mahdavi Pardis
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar