Mobilizing Piety: Gendered Morality and Indonesian–Saudi Transnational Migration

Abstract

This paper focuses on the emotional discourses invoked in efforts to frame and control Indonesian women's labor migration to Saudi Arabia. Based on interviews with migrant recruiters, state officials, and migrants in West Java, as well as data collected by migrant rights activists, the paper examines the emotional vocabularies and imagined geographies of gendered piety that are deployed in attempts to mobilize, direct, and discipline women's transnational labor migration. It explores articulations of women's virtue as a key dimension of the moral geographies of Indonesian women's overseas migration. More broadly, it suggests that such attention to struggles over the regulation of emotion can serve as a lens onto the ways in which gender articulates with the religiously-inflected transnational labor market linking Indonesia with Saudi Arabia.

Retheorizing the Postsecular Present: Embodiment, Spatial Transcendence, and Challenges to Authenticity Among Young Christians in Glasgow, Scotland

“…The third is the deconstruction of the category of religion itself in relation to the secular, inspired by Asad's (1999Asad's ( , 2003 Foucauldian analysis of religion in modernity and the deployment of religious categories for the support of modernist visions of social life. Feminist scholarship on Muslim women, for instance, has engaged the concept of piety to describe and explain interconnectedness of the social, political, economic, and spiritual self (e.g., Mahmood 2005;Deeb 2006;Silvey 2007). A fourth area concerns the persistence of religion or spirituality in places previously assumed to be secular and the reintegration of religious institutions and leadership into public life (e.g., Knott 2010).…”

Gendered Morality and Development Narratives: The Case of Female Labor Migration from Indonesia

“…Furthermore, these gender and moral ideologies are usually religiously and culturally inflected [82]. Although Indonesia is a religiously plural country, the vast majority of Muslim voters and politicians arguably ensure the strong influence that Islamic discourse and the Muslim population have over national politics.…”

“…The gender-specific exploitation and abuses confronting Indonesia's migrant domestic worker population have been widely documented [6,7,23,32,51,52,57,81,82,[85][86][87][88][89][90]. While experiences of migration are variously dependent on chance, luck and a migrant's confidence, personality and skills, many of these women usually risk or are trapped in forms of debt bondage to informal recruiters, recruitment agencies or employers; face physical, verbal or psychological violence by employers; have unregulated work hours and conditions and share their employers' residences.…”

“…In addition to the state's emphasis on individual self-responsibility and discipline as a factor for successful migration and development, I highlight two examples to support scholars who note that the Indonesian state and recruitment agents promote migration not only in its economic promises and advantages, but also in terms of gendered, moral, and religious or spiritual development-such as representing migration in terms of carrying out a patriotic or (feminine) familial duty [51,[80][81][82].…”

1 Migration, Gender, Social Justice, and Human Insecurity

“…These insights emphasize the contextual nature of 'gender' as power relations within the household defining the actors' cultural dispositions and their derived bargaining power. The labour market, social networks, and national policy and legislation also play an important role in making the motivation to migrate legitimate (Silvey 2007).…”