UNDERSTANDING THE TEXTURES OF POWER AND PATRIARCHY: EVERYDAY LIVES OF TAMIL DOMESTIC WORKERS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Through an investigation of Tamil domestic workers’ (TDW) everyday lives, this thesis will deconstruct the structural and contextual ways in which patriarchal powers manifest and influence decision- making at each stage of their migrant journey. The lens of the everyday is crucial in explicating the nature of anxieties that pervade their lives, the various articulations of agency and spaces for resistance within and beyond the context of the migrant labour regime.

This research is based on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork comprising of in-depth interviews, participant observation and participatory action research conducted across various sites in India and Singapore. I employ anthropological analyses of TDWs’ narratives that are rooted in theories of everyday life, gender and patriarchy and the coloniality of labour, attuning especially to TDWs social location vis a vis the state of race and class relations in Singapore and India. Essentially, I problematize the puzzle of power and patriarchy that continues to render TDWs ‘invisible’ despite labouring in Singaporean Indian households for the past four decades.