“Supermaids”: Hyper-resilient Subjects in Neoliberal Migration Governance

Abstract

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.

Returning broke and broken? Return migration, reintegration and transnational social protection in the Philippines

“…Even when migrant envision their return, informal social protection by the family features more prominently than state-sponsored programs, suggesting not only that these programs have misaligned notions of a return migrant but also that families lie at the heart of the imagined return of these temporary migrant workers. While existing programs and policies are thought to be sophisticated, the programs' blindness to the needs of the migrant workers is consistent with the idea of a global labour market place that is 'without government' and fosters a view of resilient migrant workers left to their own to survive abroad (Chee, 2020).…”

Informality during migration, “conversion” within and across national spaces: Eliciting moral ambivalence among informal brokers

“…In Indonesia and the Philippines, government-mandated formal pre-departure programmes provide departing FDWs with basic skills training. Such training also constitutes workers' subjectivities by instilling beliefs in resilience and docility (Chee, 2020;Rodriguez & Schwenken, 2013). In such ways migrant vulnerability and social inequalities are actively produced across transnational circuits and scale by a range of social actors (Chacko & Price, 2020;Polanco, 2017).…”

‘The Good Live-in Care Worker’: Subject Formation and Ethnicisation in Austrian Live-in Care

“…The emphasis on independence, flexibility, and adaptiveness embodied by live-in workers mirrors the neoliberal ideal of the mobile, active, and agile self (Chee 2020; see also Bröckling 2007;Lessenich 2008). Instead of questioning (lacking) regulations that produce precarious working conditions, it shifts the responsibility for good care and working conditions to the individual care worker.…”