Resilience is a concept in world politics that emerged as a way to respond to the impossibility of guaranteeing security in an era of complexity. Without a central authority to provide security, risk is devolved to the individual. Those who cannot secure themselves are enjoined to constantly adapt to the unknown. Where control over complex systems is now thought to be impossible, the path to managing risks is through self-control. This paper demonstrates how such a subject is produced, and indeed whose production, I argue, is crucial to the functioning of a global labor market that is governed “without government.” Migrant domestic workers acutely instantiate the kind of human subjectivity called forth by neoliberalism—a “resilient subject.” The paper describes how this ideal worker is produced through resilience training in various stages of the migration trajectory—during recruitment, training prior to deployment, and while on their overseas residency. This paper demonstrates how managing the insecurities of migrant domestic work means working on the “self” rather than addressing gaps in legal or regulatory mechanisms. In resilience training, the worker becomes the necessary component of neoliberalism as a governmental rationality, one that is enjoined to transform risk into opportunity.
This paper presents an ethics premised on a post-Cartesian ontology: that what we know is how we know and vice versa. The acknowledgment of the international relations (IR) scholar's constitutive relation to the world she seeks to describe, and of which she is a part, entails an ethics that is also a practice and an agency. I build on Karen Barad's quantum theory and on Michel Foucault's notion of parrhesia to address two problems in IR theory, namely that reflexivity and the pragmatist call for praxis pay insufficient attention to how power conditions knowledge production. Barad offers an “ethico-onto-epistemology” as a nonrepresentationalist methodology, which attends to the material difference knowledge can make rather than the accuracy of our representations. Parrhesia, in turn, problematizes our relationship with the activity of knowing itself. In the pragmatist sense, we are asked not only to be of use to our communities, but also to be mindful of who we are and what kind of subject we become in our phenomenal inscriptions of reality. This quantum ethic allows us to better realize the pragmatist ideal of a democratic social science by allowing us to resist the centripetal force of epistemic sovereignty and the cooptation of scientific authority.
This paper examines how migrant domestic workers subvert domination, exploitation and subjection through performances on TikTok videos. Through this confessional social medium, workers exercise a form of autonomy in severely restrictive employment and living conditions, where collective action may not only be improbable but also illegal. I argue that these videos demonstrate Foucauldian counter-conduct or the “art of not being governed so much.” Counter-conduct is an exercise of agency which transforms the self and others through relations of power. It is a form of resistance distinct to a category of workers who have limited access to the public sphere due in part to the gendered nature of cooking, cleaning and caring. Domestic work is not normally included in labour laws and the place of employment are employers’ private homes. This makes it difficult to organize or make rights claims. I build on a Foucauldian ‘analytics of resistance’ to examine the practices, mentalities and subjectivities performed by migrant domestic workers in videos produced at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, a period of tremendous stress on households. These videos became a popular medium among workers in the Middle East to express themselves, alleviate isolation and connect with others. In so doing, so-called ‘modern slaves,’ enact freedom, already present, as subjects of ethics and politics.
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