Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East: The Home and the World

For over half a century, the Middle East - and the Arabian Peninsula in particular - has been major migration corridor for domestic workers from Asia and Africa. Migrant domestic workers comprise a significant proportion of the migrant labour force in these countries, in some cases, nearly fifty per cent. This volume goes beyond a discussion of the working conditions of migrant domestic workers to show the multidimensionality of their lives in the Middle East. The chapters illustrate these women's varied processes of "making a home in the world," the existential transformations they undergo, and the multiple ways in which they are able to exert agency, despite the constrained choices they are often forced to make. Contributors show how the spaces these women occupy disrupt and challenge given notions of the public-private divide, re-working them as spaces of encounter and of relationships of belonging, spiritual connection, friendship, conviviality, and sociality. This volume presents a vibrant portrait of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East as more than passive victims of abuse and exploitation, showing how they (like people everywhere) are actively engaged in finding a balance between acting and being acted upon, between struggle and accommodation, closure and openness, and movement and stasis.

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.

Bina Fernandez is Lecturer at the School of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of Transformative Policy for Poor Women: A New Feminist Framework (2012).

Marina de Regt is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at VU University, The Netherlands. She is the author of Pioneers or Pawns? Women Health Workers and the Politics of Development in Yemen (2007).

1. Making a Home in the World: Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East; Bina Fernandez and Marina de Regt
2. Forging Intimate and Work Ties: Migrant Domestic Workers Resist in Lebanon; Amrita Pande
3. Degrees of (un)freedom: The Exercise of Agency by Ethiopian Migrant Domestic Workers in Kuwait and Lebanon; Bina Fernandez
4. Immobilized Migrancy: Inflexible Citizenship and Flexible Practices
Among Migrants in the Gulf; Pardis Mahdavi
5. The 'Mama Mary' of the White City's Underside: Reflections on a
Filipina Domestic Workers' Block Rosary in Tel Aviv, Israel; Claudia Liebelt
6. Creating a 'New Home' Away from Home: Religious Conversions of Filipina Domestic Workers in Dubai and Doha; Naomi Hosoda and Akiko Watanabe
7. Caring for the Future in the Kingdom: Saudi and Filipino Women Making Home in a World of Movement; Nada Elyas and Mark Johnson
8. 'Shall We Leave or Not?' Ethiopian Women's Notions of Home and Belonging and the Crisis in Yemen; Marina de Regt