Geographies of Transnational Domesticity: Migration Risks, Intersectional Disadvantage, and Mitigation Strategies by Foreign Domestic Workers from Myanmar

Abstract

Low-paid domestic work abroad is particularly devalued in Myanmar’s traditional culture but an increasing number of women from Myanmar are taking up such work. Negative perceptions of domestic worker migration in Myanmar—rationalizing as well as reinforced by a government ban on women’s migration as domestic labor (from 2014–2019)—entrenches gender inequalities in the country and individualizes the risks that women encounter during migration. The stigma attached to paid domestic work is extended to a transnational context during migration to Singapore. This article contributes geographical perspectives to the literature on migration risk by highlighting the scalar and transnational dimensions of risk, as well as the entanglement of the public and private spheres. The article also proposes the concept of “multiple intersectional domains” to capture how intersectional identities crosscut with particular social locations to produce cumulative disadvantage during migration. The Myanmar government’s lack of recognition and protection for migrant domestic workers, alongside the “hidden” geographies of domestic work in Singapore, result in structural conditions that entrench risks across multiple intersectional domains thereby enacting slow violence on such migrants. The article draws on qualitative multisited field work conducted in Myanmar and Singapore between 2018 and 2019.