Sexualised politics of proximities among female transnational migrants in Singapore

✍ Scribed by Brenda S. A. Yeoh; Shirlena Huang

• Book ID: 105361288
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 101 KB
• Volume: 16
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1544-8444
• DOI: 10.1002/psp.579

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

In going beyond the general observation in the geographical literature that migrant women are often rendered ‘out of place’ in both globalisation discourses and the material spaces of the global city, we draw on a comparative frame in order to tease out more specific insights. The paper compares the sexualised moral discourses generated by the presence of two different groups of transnational migrant women in the city – foreign domestic workers primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka who provide domestic service in home spaces, and pei du ma ma (‘study mothers’) from China accompanying their young children studying in Singapore schools. While the two groups are very different from each other (in terms of nationality, ethnicity, socio‐economic status, and immigration category), they are both inserted into the globalising city as ‘foreign women’ and independent migrants who are unaccompanied, and therefore ‘unprotected’, by male figures. Both groups inspire within local society certain anxieties of the other, as each in a different but equally uncomfortable way can become potentially proximate to the ‘self’. While fear of the foreign domestic worker's sexualised danger is primarily rooted in her physical proximity in the privatised spaces of the home, suspicions surrounding the study mother tend to stem from her racial proximity. These forms of sexualised politics have a crippling effect on the forging of progressive feminist alliances between local and migrant women. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.