Southern sites of female agency: informal regimes and female migrant labour resistance in East and Southeast Asia

Female migrant workers, especially the foreign domestic workers (FDWs) who comprise the majority of women migrants in Asia, are generally portrayed as having little or no agency in the world economy. Scholars of Asian migration have traditionally conceived of female migrant workers as either passive victims of global power structures (emphasising macroeconomic ‘demand and supply’ dynamics) or isolated actors exerting micro agency through acts of ‘everyday resistance’, while regulatory international political economy (RIPE) scholarship has largely failed to consider them at all. But while substantial evidence exists that reveals the extent to which the human and labour rights of FDWs are violated in East and Southeast Asia (Piper and Iredale 2003), it is wrong to portray these workers as either passive bearers of the weight of global structures or simply the objects of transnational advocacy campaigns (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Although FDWs are clearly subjected to structural oppression and are often objectified by well-meaning non-governmental organisations (NGOs), a significant number of FDWs attempt to mediate their experiences of work not only personally, but in conjunction with other migrant workers. When combined with the campaigns of middle-class activists associated with NGOs acting both within national boundaries and across them, these attempts at defiance constitute an informal regime that interacts with – and has the potential to influence – the formal industrial relations and immigration regimes that seek to control and regulate foreign domestic labour at the national and international levels.