Overview

This book is about Indonesian women's experience of labour migration as Foreign Domestic Helpers (FDHs) in Hong Kong from 2000 to 2014. Based on ethnographic research, it examines the cultural transformations amongst Indonesian women through their experiences as migrant labour activists, secular and religious grassroots leaders, as lovers and partners in heterosexual and same-sex romantic relationships and marriages, as mothers of unplanned pregnancies and their babies born out of wedlock in Hong Kong, and as undocumented migrants when they overstay their visas. It argues that migrant women's responses to the unfamiliar contexts of employment in Hong Kong attest to their personal agencies as always active, conscious, deliberate and adaptive, beyond theoretical dualities of resistance and docility. It introduces the role of migrant-worker supporting NGOs (non-governmental organisations) in the welfare, empowerment and advocacy of FDHs in Hong Kong. This book demonstrates how changes to Foreign Domestic Helpers' lives involve unequal market relations where social differences and inequalities determine the conditions and options within which migrant women make decisions and exercise their agencies. This study's importance lies in its attention to ethnographic detail, women's perspectives of their experiences of empowerment and disempowerment, and provides a thoroughgoing grassroots' understanding of labour migration among poor women from a developing country to an economically advanced destination. It is a documentation of a contemporary form of human mobility and women's work for students and researchers in women's studies, gender, development and migration studies, and for the general reader. CHAPTER OUTLINES Chapter One relates the Asian Financial Crisis to the systematic and exponential export of Indonesian women to Hong Kong as domestic helpers from 1,000 in 1990 to 40,000 in 2000 and 150,000 by 2011. Chapter Two provides the background of their employment in Hong Kong and their social and legal exclusions as Foreign Domestic Helpers as context for the ensuing chapters. Chapter Three is about Indonesian women's labour activism, and their understanding of their own roles as activists and grassroots leaders. Chapter Four is about Indonesian women and their roles as Muslims and as religious leaders. Chapter Five presents their perspectives of power, leadership and authority as secular grassroots leaders. Chapter Six presents Indonesian women's experiences of disempowerment in Indonesia that include factors such as poverty, broken families, adultery, arranged marriages, son-preferences, favouritism among siblings, domestic violence in marriage, etc. and show how they recover. Chapter Seven is about the centrality of women's shelters and networks in Hong Kong and the nature of migrant-NGOs' leadership and power vis a vis grassroots activists and leaders, volunteers and supporters. Chapter Eight discusses the romantic relationships of Indonesian women migrants in Hong Kong with local and foreign men, the problem of sexual violence, unwanted pregnancies, their babies born in Hong Kong, those brought home to Indonesia or adopted, and their marriages and settlement in Hong Kong. Chapter Nine examines the stories of Indonesian women involved in same-sex relationships in Hong Kong with other Indonesian women, what these relationships mean to them and the relationship between labour migration and Indonesian women's transitory homosexual liaisons in Hong Kong. Chapter Ten illustrates how illegalities are created in labour migration by employers, recruitment and employment agencies, by the State and its representatives and by Indonesian women who overstay their visas. Chapter Eleven concludes with concerns that the agencies of non-western women are often misunderstood in academic work. that reveal the limits in scholarly assumptions in cultural translations.

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