‘Ideal’ Migrant Subjects: Domestic Service in Globalization

Project content: This project will examine and understand the processes, reasons, and consequences of forming ideal migrant subjects in the global care market based on the migration of women in Sri Lanka to the Middle East as domestic workers. In doing so, it will look at the wider societal practices engaged in the discourse of ideal migrant subjects, including employers, recruiters, brokers, state and non-state agencies, and migrant domestic workers themselves, who attach varying and often overlapping and competing meanings and uses to transnational domestic work. Research questions: Three research questions are attempted: Who are ideal migrant subjects?; How are they created and on what basis?; and, What are the economic, social, cultural, and political implications of ideal migrant subjects? Methods: This project will use post-structuralist, ethnographic fieldwork method, which acknowledges that people structure, describe, and give meaning to their lives through narratives over which they hold power. Thus, taking an interpretive and participatory approach to exploring the phenomenon of ideal migrant subjects, this project will examine migration of Sri Lankan domestic workers to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a popular transnational route for Sri Lankan domestic workers in the global care market. Through the integration of different actors engaged in the discourse, a participant text of both the subject and subjectivities will be created. Originality and innovation: First, this rests with the context of research chosen. Given the social, cultural, and political contexts, the Middle East represents a distinct regime of domestic care, which contrasts with those existing in the Global North and newly industrialized Asia. Exploring the Middle Eastern care regime, which is theoretically and politically demanding, will allow for an understanding of the localized dynamics of globalization in forming ideal migrant subjects. Second, by integrating intermediate collectivessocialgroups thatdefystraightforward racial categorization: nonwhite/nonblack, but brownand thus brownness as a racial construct, this project will contribute to mainstream scholarship on race and its intersections with other forms of social inequality in producing ideal migrant subjects. Third, this project will bring together and examine the wider societal practices engaged in the discourse of migrant subjects and thus the complex power relations and power dynamics played out in the global market in creating ideal migrant subjects. Finally, this project will collaborate with an ongoing FWF-project, Decent Care Work? Transnational Home Care Arrangements, headed by this projects mentor, which is part of a D-A-CH-collaboration with partner projects in Frankfurt and Zurich addressing similar questions. This will result in an exchange between the two care regimes in the discourse of migrant subjects.

FWF Public Relations Summary EN This project explored the discourse of migrant subject-making in the sense of 'Who are ideal migrant subjects?', 'How are they created and on what basis?', and 'What are the economic, social, cultural and political implications of ideal migrant subjects?' based on the migration of Sri Lankan women to the Gulf as paid domestic workers. The project used qualitative methods and examined Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as the two case studies, which represent two leading destination countries for Sri Lankan migrant domestic workers (MDWs) that dates to the 1980s. The discourse of migrant subject-making involves many and often competing stakeholders, including state and non-state agents, employers, migration brokers and MDWs. Each stakeholder party has its own stakes in paid migrant domestic labour and therefore its own characterization of the 'ideal' MDW. Consequently, there is no single, but multiple and often conflicting answers to the question of who 'ideal' MDWs are. The answers range from slavish and servile to professional workers, on the one hand, and from the 'ideal' Sri Lankan substitute mother to light-skinned, modern Western Filipina migrant subject, on the other hand. Nevertheless, the individual answers including those of MDWs cross paths, co-constructing 'ideal' MDWs as 'docile, disciplined and hardworking subjects'. There is no single way to create 'ideal' migrant subjects, but it is complex and multidirectional. Different stakeholders use different 'technologies of subject-making' that intend to provide MDWs with the capacities necessary to perform paid domestic work in countries outside their own, specifically in the oil-rich Gulf. These technologies are based on state authority (e.g., laws and policy) and private power (e.g., compulsion, punishment and reward). Therefore, in striving to supply a desirable product, the stakeholders integrate market and non-market elements, thereby creating 'blended technologies' of subject-making in an embedded market with inherent relations of dominance and subjugation. Creating 'ideal' migrant subjects is neither unproblematic nor uncontested. The group-based characteristics, such as gender, nationality, race and language as shorthand for 'ideal' workers effect a migrant division of labour in the Gulf household. These 'informed stereotypes', (re)construct migrant subject positions, while reinforcing existing inequalities and producing new ones along intersecting structural lines. Thus, informed stereotypes and the subject positions constructed through them significantly restrain MDWs' agency, creating conditions of 'unfree labour'.