Large numbers of women from the developing economies have responded by crossing borders as domestic workers and even migrant spouses. The edited volume by Sara L. Friedman and Pardis Mahdavi, Migrant Encounters: Intimate Labor, The State, and Mobility Across Asia , provides rich and nuanced accounts of the intricate and often precarious circumstances fallen into by many migrant women.
It also sheds light on the unusual but innovative measures they come up with to counteract the difficulties they meet in foreign lands. The nine chapters comprising this book are mostly based on interviews, observations, and case studies of migrant domestics and marriage migrants from China, India, Philippines, and other Southeast Asian countries working in Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and the Gulf countries.
The cases of migration and migrant experiences analyzed in the anthology reveal unexpectedly fluid and dynamic forces generated at the intersections of rigid policies, intimate labor, and individual agency that together may lead to a change in inhumane law and exploitative practices common in the region.
In Chapter 2, Filippo Osella discusses public anxiety over morality and sexuality of migrant men working in the Gulf and their wives left home in Kerala. For many decades, massive numbers of differing classes, castes, genders, and ages migrated from the state to the Gulf.
In Chapter 3, Pardis Mahdavi explains the presence of stateless children in the Gulf countries. Their extremely sexist and racist policies punish migrant women severely if they, either voluntarily or involuntarily, have a child. Their future is bleak. In Chapter 4, Nicole Constable reports about migrant domestics in Hong Kong who are denied their rights to family reunification.
