Introduction: Women, Mobilities, Immobilities and Empowerment

Abstract

The articles in this volume are collated from field studies in East and Southeast Asia on several key aspects of women's experiences related to work and mobility. They highlight a range of issues based on women's labor as migrants, whose social or biological, paid or unpaid labor, are structural continuities that characterize the nature of women's role and status within households and families across cultural systems in East and Southeast Asia. The articles in this volume demonstrate how contemporary developments in work and mobility affect women migrants from developing countries. The 21st century has been said to be one that will see the rise and dominance of Asia. To fuel this systemic economic takeoff implies an increase in human flows within and to this region to respond to demographic and economic differentials across the region. Against this backdrop, this volume discusses the role that women in migration play as foreign wives, domestic workers and seasonal rural to urban migrants. It maps some of the issues that they confront in destination countries, as well as in their own homes as absent wives, mothers and daughters in expanded networks of global householding. On another level, this volume frames the overseas employment and settlement of women migrants in destination countries, in the contexts of contestations between States, organized labor exporters and emergent migrant women's movements, which for migrant women represent their individual and collective strategies for making a ‘bare life’1 (Agamben, 1998:177, 180) liveable. The studies here underscore the potential that migration offers to women in this region, while highlighting the complexities and contradictions in labor supply and its relationship to politics, culture and capital.