Refugee-Ness and Exploitation: A Feminist Geography of Shitty Jobs

Abstract

ABSTRACT Few people who participate in refugee resettlement programs expect long-term employment in shitty jobs, yet this is what many find in the United States. For Shamimah, Azizah, and Nila, three Burmese Muslim women who were resettled in Aurora, Colorado from Malaysia, the local workplaces where they find themselves are crucibles of oppression, albeit ones that are distinctively global. This essay is concerned with theorizing the relationship between global topographies of displacement (Katz 2001), resettlement programs, and capitalism through a study of two Colorado workplaces that affix refugee-ness to people through specific forms of worker discipline and subjectivization. While a significant subset of feminist scholarship on refugees and re/settlement rightfully focuses on state institutions, the workplace remains understudied. I argue that affixing refugee-ness to women is both an expression of racial capitalism and a process of commodification. Burmese women’s experiences clarify how refugee-ness works both as otherness and a discrete identity to dehumanize immigrants, smooth processes of exploitation, and sow division among similarly racialized immigrants. Though employers may foreclose many forms of immigrant solidarity, the women’s forceful rebukes of workplace abuse and their community activities outside work likewise underscore their toughness, creativity, and the enduring significance of social reproduction spaces for supporting solidarities between precarious workers.