Labour(ed) Relations: Migrant Women and Performative Labour

Abstract

This chapter addresses the dynamics of how migrant and minority-ethnic women in Ireland negotiate experiences of cultural invisibility, on the one hand, and hyper-surveillance on the other. I focus on the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity and class in women’s experience of domestic work and the sex industry as explored by Susan Gogan and the Domestic Workers Support Group’s large-scale collaborative photography project (DWSG) Opening Doors: Migrant Domestic Workers Speak Through Art (2007), and two plays, Alice Coghlan’s Sylvia’s Quest (2011, Wonderland Productions) and Mirjana Rendulic’s Broken Promise Land (2013, Stone’s Throw Theatre). These works’ narratives of labour as forced disappearance in Ireland highlight global circuits of economic inequality Together, they call into question how an egalitarian interculturalism will be possible given the differential labour conditions of many migrants and their lack of legal recourse. This chapter exposes social interculturalism’s blind spots regarding identity politics in a European context as the rhetoric of ‘unity in diversity’ and individual self-determination suppresses the political urgency of coalitional politics within and between minority-ethnic groups.