‘I am very good at my work!’ A narrative inquiry of Southeast Asian marriage migrants’ identity negotiations through their work

Abstract

ABSTRACT The majority of applied linguistics research on intra-Asia marriage migrants has focused on their negotiations of ethnic gender identities in the home and educational arenas. Little is known about their experiences as workers in the host society. Drawing on the case of Taiwan, this paper examines how Southeast Asian marriage migrants negotiate identities through work. Drawing on positioning theory and adopting a narrative approach, this study analyzed in-depth interviews with eleven marriage migrants to understand how they represent self and other through narrating work experiences and how their work experiences and identity negotiations are interconnected with shifting representations of marriage migrants in Taiwan – from ‘social problems’ to ‘social assets’ under the recent New Southbound Policy, aimed to cultivate economic ties with ASEAN countries. In their work stories, they are competent, committed workers and valuable bilingual speakers, who actively harness their linguistic capital for newly available language-related jobs. While encountering occasional discrimination at work, they are, however, not passive victims, but agentive individuals who confront ethnicised gender inequality.