Session Name: Fertility, Reproduction and Asia's Next Generation
More than labor: the everyday reproductive experiences of migrant factory workers in Singapore
Monday, July 29, 2024
11:15 – 13:00 (GMT+7)
Paper Abstract: A burgeoning literature on transnational labour migration and social reproduction has mainly focused on how migrants are incorporated into the global economy to address the social reproductive needs of host states, but very little scholarly and public attention has been paid to migrants' own reproductive experiences, as they are primarily viewed as workers. This is particularly true in Asia, where transnational migrant workers are governed through temporary migration regimes under which they are permitted to labour but not settle in host states. This enforced temporariness helps justify the deliberate neglect of migrant worker's social reproductive needs and lives. This paper, using the case of Chinese migrant factory workers in Singapore, explores the social reproductive worlds of migrant workers and makes visible the diversity of their social and intimate lives taking place outside the production sphere. It examines how migrant women develop strategies to negotiate temporary migration regimes in order to advance their own social mobility and reproduction projects. It also examines how their agentive practices and everyday reproduction are connected to their lives and relations in the sphere of production. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with 96 Chinese migrant workers in Singapore, this paper contributes to the critical feminist approaches to migration and foregrounds the inextricable link between spheres of production and reproduction, and between the global and the intimate.
Presenter(s)
WY
Wei Yang
Asia Research Institute - National University of Singapore, Singapore