'Home' and 'away': Foreign domestic workers and negotiations of diasporic identity in Singapore

Abstract

World cities produced by the processes of globalization and international migration increasingly take on shifting kaleidoscopic ethnoscapes constituted by gathering subjects of diaspora ranging from highly skilled international 'denizens' to low-skilled guest workers. In this context, we focus on migrant women from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka who enter Singapore to work as domestic workers and examine the ways these women (re)configure their social identities under conditions of diaspora. More specifically, we consider the strategies employed in navigating the space between 'home' and 'host,' including the ways in which these women try to maintain or strengthen ties (social, emotional, financial, and imagined) to 'homeland' as well as their attempts to (re)create a 'home away from home' in literal and metaphorical ways. The paper argues that notions of gender differences clearly underlie migrant women's (re)negotiations of self vis-a-vis the construction imposed by others as they seek to occupy and challenge the sociocultural spaces in which they are inserted in their host country. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.