Sexuality, Shame and Subversions in Indonesian Migrant Women’s Fiction

Abstract

AbstractThis contribution examines malu (shame) as an effect of Indonesian women’s migration, illustrating how gendered moral discourses shape the problematic politics of labour migration in the country. It argues that shame not only reinforces several problematic gender and moral discourses imposed on Indonesian migrant women but also heightens their precarious role and place in their home and host countries.This essay probes into the possibilities opened by Indonesian migrant domestic workers themselves as they write, publish and circulate their own stories in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan as part of the emerging cultural production of Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia, Indonesian Migrant Workers’ Literature. It makes an innovative contribution to this collection by analysing how, in five short fiction anthologies of Indonesian migrant domestic workersin Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, instances of shame and shaming matter in the representation of their daily lives and how they narrate their encounters and practices of queer sexual identities and interracial intimacies in transnational spaces. Through migrant women’s understanding of what counts as malu, I argue that their stories present a more complex negotiation of their precariousness, as they exhibit instances of agencyand mobility that go beyond traditional gender discourses upheld back home.