Female migrant workers (FMWs) across media and cultural spheres, humanitarian forums and academia are often represented as passive and parochial 'Third World' victims with little to no agency over their lives and bodies. In cinema, migrant agency persists in being circumscribed within hegemonic scripts of gender-specific moralities and the neoliberal ethic of individual capability and economic value. Hierarchies and biases are resultantly constructed among these underprivileged, racialized female subjects, as affirmative recognition is conferred to those considered deserving of commiseration and those who do not. This paper surveys a range of films that have emerged from South East Asia alongside current debates on the feminization of labour migration, and traces the shifting representations of agency among precarious migrant women to examine the complex relation between agency and recognition. It draws on Joel Fendelman and Patrick Daly's Remittance (2015) and Midi Z's The Road to Mandalay (2016) and their appraisal of migrant agency to examine alternative potentialities for agency to be recognized and reimagined in various contexts of patriarchal dominance, racial inequality and capital control beyond formulaic representation.
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