Choreographing the rhythms of encounter in Singapore's maid agencies

Abstract

This paper builds on Lefebvre's concept of rhythmanalysis in order to extend our understanding of geographies of encounter in everyday social life. Focusing on the encounters that take place at maid agencies that match migrant domestic workers with local employers in Singapore, we develop the conceptual construct of choreography to show how bodies in spaces of encounter are rhythmically ordered to move through space in particular ways at specific speeds and times. The concept is also useful in studying encounters between migrants and citizens not just as serendipitous events but as purposively designed. Foregrounding the tangled relationalities that exist between maid agents, domestic workers, and employers, we show how employers’ interactions with the materialities of the migration industry – such as the spatial arrangement of the maid agency and the biodata used in the selection of workers – set particular diagrammatic rhythms into motion, prefiguring corporeal migrant–local encounters before they begin. We depict migrant women's punctuated rhythms of moving and waiting, revealing how the eurythmia of the maid agency both conceals and is dependent on the arrhythmia of their bodies. Finally, by emphasising that choreography requires both design and performance, we investigate how migrant women are able to overturn the ordering of rhythms through improvisational moments. Attending to the practices of the maid agency allows us to reveal how relations of power between migrants and locals are reproduced within contexts of temporary labour migration.

Times of Work and Social Life: Bangladeshi Migrants in Northeast Italy and London

“…As evidenced in our literature review, time is an under-researched and undertheorized dimension of migration and especially of the lived experiences that are temporally enfolded within migration trajectories. Cwerner's (2001) landmark paper on the "times" of migration set the initial theoretical agenda, but detailed empirical studies on the daily life and other periodic temporalities of migrants and their significant others have been slow to emerge and are few in number (e.g., Marcu 2017;Mavroudi et al 2017;Reid-Musson 2015;Wee et al 2020). Deploying the theoretical frameworks of Hägerstrand's time geography and Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis, in this article we have comparatively analyzed the contrasting temporalities of work and everyday life of Bangladeshi migrant men in Italy and onward-migrated Italian-Bangladeshis in London.…”

“…).Hence, to quote Meyer (2008, 151), capital’s destructive role consists in its “imperious contempt for the body and lived-time.” As Smith and Winders (2008) have noted in the post-Fordist context of Latino migrants in the US South, migrant bodies tend to be young, male, mobile, available wherever needed, cheap, productive, and disposable. And as several writers on migration and rhythmanalysis have made explicit, control over time is central to the operationalization of power, especially by employers (Griffiths et al 2013; Marcu 2017; Reid-Musson 2018; Wee et al 2020). Intensive agriculture, artisan workshops, large factories, tourism, and street-hawking all have differentiated daily, weekly and seasonal rhythms, which are, in turn, related to broader modes of economic regulation, such as industrial capitalism, neoliberalism, the informal economy, and so on.…”

“…This article addresses this gap and contributes to the ongoing theoretical debate on the temporalities of migration (e.g., Mavroudi, Page, and Christou 2017). In particular, we use the notion of “rhythm” as an anchoring concept that brings together mobility and the underlying forces that order and disrupt everyday lives and spaces (Wee, Goh, and Yeoh 2020, 111).…”

In the autumn of their lives: Exploring the geographies and rhythms of old[er] age masculinities

“…Andrew’s specific case is informative for the wider observation of how ageing masculinities are situated within “bundles, bouquets, [or] garlands of rhythms” (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 20) and that such bouquets may allow the incorporation of “moments of improvisation” (Wee et al, 2019, p. 2). Seen too in Richard’s broader narrative of the farming calendar – with repeated reference to “we” and “having all hands on deck” – Andrew’s extract shows how individual rhythms of older men may be woven into the rhythms of those around them.…”

Bodies and persons: The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking

“…As recent work to conceptualize encounters shows, the term captures well both the eventful coming into contact by bodily subjects and the broader contextual forces that mediate and shape these encounters (e.g. Nayak, 2017;Simonsen et al, 2017;Wee et al, 2019;Zaborowski and Georgiou, 2019). Analytically the term denotes situations characterized by 'difference, rupture and surprise' (Wilson, 2017: 452) and points to the topologies of 'encounter as simultaneously a geohistorical production and an immanent spatial event' (Cockayne et al, 2019: 10).…”