Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

The Home and the World

B. Fernandez, M. de Regt, B. Fernandez, M. de Regt, Kenneth A. Loparo, Gregory Currie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349503018
  9781137482105
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137482112
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

For over half a century, the Middle East has been major migration corridor for domestic workers from Asia and Africa. This book Illuminates the multidimensionality of these workers' lives as they engage in finding a balance between acting and being acted upon, struggle and accommodation, and movement and stasis.

Chapter 1

Making a Home in the World

Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

Bina Fernandez and Marina de Regt

For nearly half a century, the Middle East and, in particular, the Arabian Peninsula has become a major migration corridor for domestic workers from Asia and Africa. The large-scale employment of migrant domestic workers began following the oil boom in 1973. As a result of rapidly growing oil revenues, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states financed development projects in infrastructure, industry, and agriculture, which attracted migrants from neighboring Arab countries and other parts of the world. Initially, the majority of migrants were single men, with women migrating for family reunification. The increasing demand for paid domestic labor led to an increase in the number of autonomous women migrants (Castles and Miller, 2003; Moukarbel, 2009). Domestic workers came predominantly from South and Southeast Asia (e.g., the Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Indonesia), yet in the past decade, an increasing number of African women have also migrated to the Middle East. Most of them come from Ethiopia and Eritrea, but there are also women from Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Benin, and other African countries who work as domestics. In addition, while the majority of migrant domestic workers can be found on the Arabian Peninsula, they are also present in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Syria (before the civil war), and Yemen (e.g., Jureidini, 2009; Moukarbel, 2009; Liebelt, 2011; Frantz, 2008; de Regt, 2008).

The hierarchy of domestic workers at these destinations is often distinctly organized according to class and race. Upper-class families tend to employ Asian women and in particular Filipinas or Indonesian women, whereas middle-class families employ South Asian or African domestics, who are generally paid lower wages. In addition, when families employ more than one domestic worker, there is often a clear division of labor between them: Asian women tend more frequently to be employed to care for children and the elderly, while African women are more likely to be employed for cleaning and cooking tasks. Thus migrant domestic workers are not a homogeneous category; they differ, among other things, on the basis of nationality, religion, and ethnic background. In addition, not all domestic workers in the Middle East are women, although there is a predominant preference for female domestics. Migrant male workers may be employed as cooks and sometimes for cleaning and caretaking, but they most often work as guards, drivers, and gardeners within households (see Kerbage and Esim, 2011, p. 4).

While a dominant public and media discourse has tended to focus on the abuse and rights violations of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East, scholarly research is increasingly being positioned beyond this frame (e.g., Frantz, 2008; Moukarbel, 2009; Moors et al., 2009; de Regt, 2010; Werbner and Johnson, 2011, Fernandez, 2011, Liebelt, 2011, and Sabban, 2012). This book brings together the work of a group of scholars in anthropology, sociology, international studies, and development studies researching the diversity of migrant nationalities (from, among others, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, India, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Benin) in equally varied Middle Eastern contexts (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Israel, and Yemen). The initial conceptualization of this book began at a double panel on migrant domestic workers in the Middle East, which took place at the Middle East Studies Association conference in 2013. Subsequently, we worked collaboratively on the project, as each contributor to the book also peer reviewed another chapter. The aim of the book is to move beyond the economist and interventionist policy prescription perspectives of much migration research in the Middle East and to produce critical ethnographies that examine the often profound transformations experienced by these women as they leave their homes and encounter new worlds.

We frame our interpretation of the experiences of migrant domestic workers in this collection of essays through the concepts of “the home” and “the world.” These concepts speak to the yearnings, aspirations, fears, and disappointments of the women and work as a metaphor for the intimate relationships between the self and others. The “home” and the “world” also allow us to engage with the ongoing feminist debate on the boundaries between the private and public spheres. The private sphere is the “home,” associated with the family, caring, and emotions and typically signified as the natural domain of women; the public sphere, the “world” outside the home, is typically assumed to be the legitimate domain of men. Feminists of all disciplinary persuasions in Europe and North America, and increasingly in other parts of the world, are interrogating how and why these two categories of private and public are foundationally constitutive of the economic and political organization of societies and, as such, also of major theoretical constructs such as liberal democracy and human rights (Scott and Keates, 2004). While we cannot provide a review of the complex feminist literature on the public-private divide in this chapter, we first highlight ideas from this body of work that are vital for illuminating this book’s concerns with migrant domestic workers. Specifically, we discuss the constructed nature of the public-private boundary and the feminist revalorization of social reproduction. Next, we turn to examine the critical differences in how scholars of the Middle East have conceptualized the public-private divide, with an emphasis on the gender-specific implications within these contexts. We then draw on insights from the previous sections to reflect on the experiences of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East. Finally, we map out the ways in which this collection of essays invites us to rethink the categories of “the home” and “the world” as we follow the journeys of migrant domestic workers through this terrain. We outline some of the significant insights of the chapters in this book concerning how the dynamic and intertwined construction of agency, identity, and social relationships by migrant domestic workers in the Middle East reconfigures their home(s) and their world(s) and, consequently, our understandings of the private and the public.

Feminist Debates on Public-Private Boundaries

The commonsense understanding of the private sphere as activities of the home and the public sphere as everything outside the home belies the very slippery and complicated use of both terms. The etymological root of public in the Latin publicus suggests the population—more specifically, the free adult male population—engaged in the conduct of the affairs of government (Hawkesworth, 2007). Historically, females and slaves were often explicitly excluded from this public associated with politics. Such explicit exclusions are less frequent today, and the use of public has broadened to denote not only the world of government but also the world of business (confusingly called the “private sector,” to distinguish it from the government) and civil society. Indeed, for Habermas (1989 [1962]), the public sphere is the domain of civil society, conceptualized as bourgeois forms of social interaction in urban spaces such as coffeehouses, libraries, theatres, salons, societies, and lecture halls. For him, these spaces are governed by the norms of equality and rational, public deliberation, although he acknowledges that these may be “imperfectly realized.” Public is also used to indicate public action for the common or “universal good”—an ostensibly gender-neutral benefit to all members of the population that is nevertheless authored from an implicitly masculine position. Finally, public evokes the physical spaces where encounters between these varied actors take place.

Feminist historians in Europe and North America have observed that while the identification of the public sphere as male dominated and/or masculine has a longer history, the identification of the private sphere of the home exclusively with women is a more recent outcome of the transition to industrial capitalism (Hawkesworth, 2007). With industrialization, the household—previously also a site of production—was reconstituted as a site of consumption. Simultaneously, women’s labor within the household (previously recognized by the state as productive) was devalued, rendering women dependents of the male wage worker, the “breadwinner” and head of the household (Davidoff, 1998). The private sphere of the home came to be regarded as the site of reproduction, sexuality, nurturing, and emotional life—a man’s haven from the troubles of the world. For women though, as Joan Landes observes, it was no haven but rather “a site of sexual inequality, unremunerated work, and seething discontent,” often leading to “private despair” and “private isolation” (Landes, 1998, p. 1). Second-wave feminism’s slogan—“the personal is political”—was a fundamental challenge to the public-private binary, a repoliticization of the private sphere that simultaneously brought women out into the public. Feminist critiques of the public-private binary have interrogated how the divide is socially constructed through regulations around behaviors, norms, duties, and interactions within each sphere, as well as transgressions of the boundaries that separate them. These inquiries have established that the boundaries between public and private are far from absolute and that their construction is temporally and contextually contingent. Importantly, the meaning of the public sphere always depends on who has the power to construct its boundary (Fraser, 1998). Following from these observations is the recognition that the experience and understanding of the two spheres is constantly being contested and renegotiated. Nowhere is the malleability of these boundaries more obvious than in the debates surrounding domestic work.

Concomitant with the relegation of women to the private sphere was the devaluation of social reproduction, identified by feminists as biological reproduction—that is, the reproduction of labor power and the domestic and caring labor required for the fulfillment of human needs. In particular, domestic and care labor within the household has come to be viewed as a “labor of love,” entwined with familial duty and relationships. As feminists have observed, this ideologically devalues it as “real work,” even when it is paid for. Despite the low value accorded to social reproduction, as Constable (2009) points out, there has been a global increase in the “commodification of intimacy” or the intimate relations associated with reproductive labor, an increase that is linked to transnational migration and implicated in the broader capitalist processes of restructuring the global economy. To capture the multifarious aspects of this commodification, Boris and Parreñas (2010, p. 7) propose the concept of “intimate labor” to describe a wider range of occupations that share the attributes of “work that involves embodied and affective interactions in the service of social reproduction” and occupations that are situated at the interface between the private and public spheres.

Feminist economists have been at pains to demonstrate that women’s roles in social reproduction, while publicly invisible, are indispensable to the operation of the public sphere (e.g., Folbre and Hartmann, 1988; Folbre and Nelson, 2000). The social and economic importance of domestic and care work became more visible, and an issue of public debate in Europe and North America, due to the conjunction of several factors: the increased participation of women in the labor market, the demographic transition to aging societies, the political claims of care providers and users, and the continued rigidities in the gender division of labor (Williams and Brennan, 2012). In particular, the increasing number of women entering the labor market in the 1970s in high-income countries produced what Sassen (2008) has labeled “professional households without a wife.” Despite this shift, women remain primarily responsible for “homemaking” (Folbre and Nelson, 2000, p. 125), and there is little or no social or moral compulsion for men to undertake domestic and care labor, which has led to the increased commodification of such labor in these contexts. In addition, demographic changes have affected the demand for paid domestic labor: as a result of declining fertility rates and longer life expectancy rates, the need for professional caretakers of the elderly has increased. Initially, feminist advocacy for the recognition of care as a public rather than a private concern resulted in increased welfare and state provisioning of care services. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, the pressures on social expenditure following the shift from welfare state to a post-neoliberal, “social investment” paradigm have produced a degree of convergence on the marketization of care regimes across high-income states, notwithstanding their diverse historical and institutional legacies (Mahon et al., 2012). State policies for cash benefits and the “reprivatization” of care now stimulate a market for care services increasingly provided by a migrant care work force. Middle-class and wealthy families increasingly employ migrant domestic workers, nannies, and au pairs; however, as scholars have pointed out, in addition to being feminized, this labor is increasingly defined by the markers of race, ethnicity, nationality, and class (see Anderson, 2000; Parreñas, 2001; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007; Lutz, 2012). Similar developments are taking place in economically developed countries in Asia (see Adams and Dickey, 2003; Lan, 2006; Constable, 2007) and in the Middle East, as the chapters in this book illustrate.

Public-Private Boundaries in the Middle East

To what extent can the Western liberal construct of the public sphere be said to exist or to have any analytical purchase within the context of the Middle East? As Shami (2009) observes, Orientalists have characterized the Middle East as missing a public sphere, lacking the aspect of publicness that entails the political engagement of the population. Such perspectives have pointed to monarchical states, where the totality of economic, political, and often even religious space has been fully subjected to the authority of the ruler. The theoretical and empirical counterperspectives of the authors in the book edited by Shami point to a considerable divergence from this monolithic and static conceptualization of the public sphere in the Middle East, offering nuanced readings of the organization of the public (and, by implication, the private) sphere. Two crucial dimensions common to all these studies are as follows: first, the paramount importance of religion within the public sphere and second (and unsurprisingly), the significance of gender roles and identities in understanding the shifting boundaries between the public and private spheres in Muslim societies (Shami, 2009, p. 16).

In contrast to the centrality of liberal, rational, and secular values underlying the construction of “Western” public spheres, as LeVine and Salvatore (2009) point out, in Muslim majority countries, Islam plays a constitutive role in the construction of legitimate political authority, the public political community, and maslaha (the cause or source of something beneficial) or the public good. Yet, for women in the Middle East, the contours of this public are marked by a gendered, “sacred-sexual” boundary, which is not fixed but constantly subject to renegotiation (Thompson, 2003). Scholars of gender relations in the Middle East repeatedly point to the importance of situating the analysis of the public-private divide within specific historical, social, and political contexts, emphasizing the fluidity of gender boundaries over time and space. Nelson (1974), for instance, critically reviewed the perspectives of male scholars on the division of power in pastoral and sedentary societies in the Middle East and argued that women had much more power than male ethnographers had perceived. Nelson’s article was inspirational for many feminist anthropologists studying the Middle East because she showed “how the conventional Western cultural notions of power that previously informed our understandings of politics blinded us to the ways women participate in decision-making and the workings of society” (Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 291). The public/private dichotomy was also increasingly being challenged within the broader field of feminist anthropology (see MacCormack and Strathern, 1980; Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 292; Kandiyoti, 1996, p. 12). Kandiyoti (1996) showed that colonial and postcolonial states have been instrumental in the various ways the private and the public sphere have been constructed within the region. According to Thompson (2003, p. 65), “public and private gender boundaries in today’s Middle East are as much products of transnational discourses, politics, and economies as they are of internal crises in state formation and class identity.” Thompson argues that while the conceptual framework of public and private has not dominated Middle Eastern women’s history, the concepts may nonetheless be useful as lenses of historical analysis.

The intertwining of the public and private spheres in the Middle East is particularly interesting to examine in the context of the family, domestic labor, pa...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Making a Home in the World: Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East
• 2. Forging Intimate and Work Ties: Migrant Domestic Workers Resist in Lebanon
• 3. Degrees of (Un)Freedom: The Exercise of Agency by Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers in Kuwait and Lebanon
• 4. Immobilized Migrancy: Inflexible Citizenship and Flexible Practices among Migrants in the Gulf
• 5. The “Mama Mary” of the White City’s Underside: Reflections on a Filipina Domestic Workers’ Block Rosary in Tel Aviv, Israel
• 6. Creating a “New Home” Away from Home: Religious Conversions of Filipina Domestic Workers in Dubai and Doha
• 7. Caring for the Future in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: Saudi and Filipino Women Making Homes in a World of Movement
• 8. “Shall We Leave or Not?”: Ethiopian Women’s Notions of Home and Belonging and the Crisis in Yemen
• Notes on Contributors