This paper examines how migrant domestic workers subvert domination, exploitation and subjection through performances in TikTok videos. Through this confessional social medium, workers exercise a form of autonomy in severely restrictive employment and living conditions, where collective action may not only be improbable but also illegal. I argue that these videos demonstrate Foucauldian counter-conduct or the “art of not being governed so much.” Counter-conduct is an exercise of agency which transforms the self and others through relations of power. It is a form of resistance distinct to a category of workers who have limited access to the public sphere due in part to the gendered nature of cooking, cleaning and caring. Domestic work is not normally included in labour laws and the place of employment are employers’ private homes. This makes it difficult to organize or make rights claims. I build on literatures of everyday resistance to examine the practices and subjectivities embodied by migrant domestic workers in the Gulf. These videos became a popular medium among workers at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic to express themselves, alleviate isolation and connect with others. In so doing, so-called ‘modern slaves,’ enact freedom, already present, as subjects of ethics and politics.

Play and Counter-Conduct: Migrant Domestic Workers on TikTok

Throughout the Middle East migrant women are employed to work in people’s homes. While some experience good working relations with employers, others experience forms of abuse and labour coercion. This chapter evaluates critically different ways that system of unfree labour has been variously described and analysed as a form of ‘contract slavery’, ‘debt bondage’ and ‘trafficking’. It also shows how migrant women who describe themselves as ‘freelancers’ exit their original employer’s home both to escape that relation and in hopes of securing a better situation outside of the regular system of employment. Freelancing is more than simply a form of resistance. Rather, women who work as freelance migrant domestic workers challenge directly that state enforced control over their mobility and are on the vanguard of those migrants who are seeking through their own actions to effect social change.

/pdf/from-victims-of-trafficking-to-freedom-fighters-rethinking-2ydu45o9dl.pdf

From Victims of Trafficking to Freedom Fighters: Rethinking Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

This chapter explores the ways in which the care of the elderly in home settings in Saudi Arabia involves ongoing reformulations of home and family, as well as the increasing negotiation of forms of intimate labor between citizens and migrant women in that country. Specifically, we draw together two bodies of recent research: Elyas’s (2011) study of the care of the elderly in Saudi Arabia and Johnson’s (2010) and his late colleague Alicia Pingol’s (2010) study of migrant Filipino Muslims living and working in that country.1 We show how encounters between Saudi and Filipino women in this caregiving situation are concurrently shaped by a number of processes: kinship, gender and generational dynamics in Saudi Arabia and the Philippines, Saudi and Filipino women’s mobilities and their changing relational positions across the life course, the different legal and economic status that each woman occupies, and the invocation of Islam in Saudi and Filipino women’s talk about and negotiations of intimate labor within the home.

Caring for the Future in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

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Caring for the Future in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia