‘Knowing one’s place’: gender, mobility and
shifting subjectivity in Eastern Indonesia
CATHARINA PURWANI WILLIAMS
Abstract In this article I analyse the gendered space of transnational mobility by
problematizing migrant subjectivity in everyday practices. In line with feminist perspectives I highlight the significance of the micro-scale experience of female migrants
from Eastern Indonesia in acquiring mobility as a struggle for new subjectivity. I
frame this migration as a production of the subjective space of power. Based on indepth interviews with returned migrants, I present reflexive accounts of two migrants
on contract domestic work abroad to illuminate the changing contours of the relationships between gender, mobility and shifting subjectivity. Households take into account
the cultural meanings of space in everyday life including local relations in the
decisions on mobility. Strategies of ‘knowing one’s place’ reflect women’s agency in
negotiating alternative roles and positions within the intra-household dynamics and
in the workplace. Women’s personal accounts have the potential to illuminate spatial
processes of migration as a contested space for the repositioning of self in networks
of family, kin, local and global relations.
Indonesia and several other Asian nations with surplus labour provide one of the
world’s major sources of unskilled international migrant workers. Transnational
migration of both contract and undocumented workers has become the most significant aspect of Indonesia’s migration patterns and a source of public debate and policy.
In addition to undocumented migration to Malaysia, the increasing volume and
frequency of contract migration since the 1990s has been dominated by female
domestic workers previously going to Saudi Arabia and recently to other Asian
countries such as Singapore (Hugo 2002).
While the economic dimensions of unskilled transnational labour have been well
researched, micro-scale study of the experiences of transnational migration, including
social reproduction within the family at home has only recently been discussed
(Willis and Yeoh 2000). Feminist scholars have theorized the gendered nature of the
personal experience of migration.1 The significance of memories and personal accounts
as a unique way to access migrant experience has increasingly been acknowledged
(Chamberlain and Leydesdorff 2004; Hammerton 2004; Neyzi 2004; Pribilsky 2004;
Sutton 2004). Broadening this approach I am interested in the ways women’s experience of transnational migration in response to a crisis affects their identities. In this
context, crises are seen not only as problems but also as possibilities (Graham 2002).
Global Networks 5, 4 (2005) 401–417. ISSN 1470–2266. © 2005 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd & Global Networks Partnership
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In the aftermath of the regional financial crisis (1998–2000) I conducted in-depth
interviews with a group of women from East Nusa Tenggara province as a part of a
larger ethnography of women’s travels. Two personal stories are presented here to
illuminate the connections between mobility and shifting subjectivities.2
East Nusa Tenggara is the least urbanized, least connected by transport and poorest
province in Indonesia with less than 20 per cent of the population living in urban areas
(Figure 1). The dispersed, small population – occupying little pockets of fertile land –
live in the scattered islands of the region. Out of a population of 3.7 million, 88 per cent
profess to Christianity (NTT 2001). In the past, it was the practice of young men from
certain coastal localities to migrate. In the pre-colonial period, men’s domain of
mobility, involving trade and other localized interactions including migration, was
conducted via inter-island routes. As Graham explains: ‘the ancestral migrations and
early exchanges of goods and know-how are memorialized in mythic form by many
people of Flores, who regard knowing and respecting their origins as crucial to their
contemporary survival. Such myths and historical accounts often depict Flores not as a
bounded entity, but in relation with various “outsiders”’ (Graham 1999: 72). In contrast,
women’s spatial movement is mostly related to their domestic roles in the household.
During my field work, I found women of Kedang (Flores) spending significant amounts
of time walking considerable distances (up to two hours twice daily) to fetch water from
springs. I also observed the labour-intensive activities of preparing food for the
family, starting by lighting fires first thing in the morning using firewood. During the
day they spend long hours and undertake hard physical labour in producing handloomed textiles. Three strong material symbols – water, firewood and loom – stand
out among others to represent their gender roles and local femininity. Water and
firewood signify women’s work in providing food and other services for household
reproduction. The loom signifies women’s roles within the clan or community in
upholding obligations to customary law (adat). The result of hand loomed textiles
(tenun ikat) involves a very labour-intensive process with the finest products used for
ceremonial purposes. Women’s tasks in caring for the family are naturalized at home
within their gendered spaces of family and kinship system.
Through mythical representation in the form of folk narratives, locals think of
themselves in terms of their relationship with the ‘other’. Migration has been a way of
encountering the ‘other’ but it now has the added dynamic of women being included
as both migrant and ‘other’. Contemporary women now follow some long-established
male trails by sailing not only between islands but also moving transnationally to
forge connections with other shores. No longer just waiting for their men to come
home, women also circulate, engaging in their own spatial practices. For women,
sojourning to work abroad challenges their spatial association with home and a
particular femininity (McDowell 1999) thus stepping into an ambiguous contested
space of female migration.
In this article I explore the personal experiences of two female migrants,
problematizing their spatial practices in moving up in the network of social relations
and the resulting shifting subjectivities. Through contract migration women negotiate
gendered mobility, creating a subjective space of power (Williams 2003). First, I
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Figure 1: Percentages of Urban Population: Indonesia
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examine alternative notions of politics of place that contest the main discourse of
globalization in the context of migration. Second, I provide empirical evidence of
how the women negotiated their gender roles and mobility. In this context, I am
concerned with everyday strategies of female migrants experiencing differing power
relations according to their spatial positions. Migrants’ narratives – including
recollections of journey, memory, and also drawing – help us to understand both
material realities of migration and their subjectivities. Finally, I discuss the
implications of spatial practices of transnational migration to women’s shifting
subjectivities.
Female mobility and the politics of place
Sojourning to work abroad highlights the interconnections of globalization in
economic, political and cultural arenas. The discourse of globalization has produced
female migrants as local subjects ‘who are subordinated to, and contained within a
“global capitalist economy”’ (Graham 2002: 19). The construction of marginality in
relation to migration points to the underlying power structure that underpins migrants’
identity. Even though migrant women’s economic identities are ‘unfixed, multiple,
flexible and floating, perhaps because of the ambivalent valorization in their gender
and economic roles’ (Graham 2002: 20) they are often represented in the limited
sense of ‘victims’. The idea of limits within the position of marginality for a migrant
at a specific time and place leads me to the notion of ‘spatial entanglements’. Female
mobility contests a local femininity, transgressing a spatial association of women with
home. Migrants’ spatial entanglements conjure up the ‘knotting and weaving of
power’ (Sharp et al. 2000: 24) to convey the complexities of spatial mobility and its
shifting subjectivities. Migrants have to negotiate varying degrees of social relations
and differences in their place of origin and destination to attain a relatively upward
social mobility.
Consideration of multiple scales of power relations is critical to understanding
women’s politics of location in their experience of migration. Geometries of power
that constitute various forms of political, economic and cultural relations, including
the internal structure of domination and subordination, stretch out to women’s lives
through globalization, the state, local community, and their household (Massey 1993).
In migration, women face a problem of locality, which is actually ‘a problem of the
subject’ (Graham 2002: 19). Migrant women, I argue, rise to the challenge of mobility
by playing the politics of place that enable shifting subjectivities. They constantly
reposition themselves in the context of family/kin and new social and economic
relations. Women’s experience of migration accessed through their own personal
accounts as expanded in the later sections show that they creatively reconfigure their
position through mobility.
In exploring migration stories, I am less interested in the economics of contract
work abroad or in the cultural opposites of ‘the dynamic social relations of dominance
and difference’ between employers and foreign employees (Momsen 1999: 1), which
carry the risk of homogenizing migrants’ experience and erasing parts of their
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identities (Silvey and Lawson 1999: 127). Instead, I focus on the subject, her
interpretations and politics of place, particularly the mutually constituted spaces and
subjectivities in migration. More specifically, I explore migrants’ shifting subjectivity
from their perspectives of spatial mobility.
I present migrants’ personal stories attending to the ways migrants are engaged in
re-positioning their selves around their body, home and community, so constituting
their politics of place. The politics of place that captures migrants’ experience of
place through migration, in particular their everyday strategies and practices disrupt
the notion of a binary relationship between ‘the local’ and ‘global’ (Harcourt 2002:
6). I deal with the experiences of migrants in their daily concerns for the family from
the distance, which qualifies as global processes. Women’s politics of place while
sojourning open a space in which to understand the diverse manifestations of
globalization (Harcourt and Escobar 2002: 8). The specificity of migrants’ economic
identities and positions points to the globalization process and at the same time their
everyday strategies indicate a degree of autonomy of the subject. As a migrant the
self-repositioning starts from the materiality of the body. ‘The body is the site for
many struggles over different identities, ways of thought and daily practices’
(Harcourt and Escobar 2002). The spatiality of the body changes as migrants move.
Being away from their male kin, the first-time migrants whom I interviewed endured
frightening levels of threats over their personal safety in addition to the physical
discomforts of being on the road. For many migrant women the body becomes the
closest site of struggle through migration.
The home, where many women still derive their most important social and
political roles and identities, is an important reference. Redefining their relationships
within home, as well as between home and the wider community is therefore an
important site for elaborating new strategies. As migrant women change their home,
in many ways they also change their way of life, and way of being, and also the way
of thinking connected to their identities (Harcourt and Escobar 2002: 9). Home is a
site of familiarity. Migration is a constructed space comprising a range of spatial
practices offering a critical distance from familiarity. Distance often facilitates new
perspectives. The new perspective arising from familiarity is that of seeing and
knowing other places and spaces. Migration is bounded by points of departure and
destination and therefore defined by perceptions of familiarity or home.
In Flores, East Nusa Tenggara, home is not only closely linked to a house or
dwelling which serves as a basic unit of social organization; it is also equivalent to the
identity of kin groups. It involves an origin that relates to a family genealogy or
source of blood (Forth 1998; Tule 2004). Migration therefore involves a reworking of
the personal and a ‘de-familiarization’, a break and separation of the collective
identities as reflected in the meanings of home and family/kin.
For Eastern Indonesian women, migration represents a reworking of their
association with home. Their cultures recognize that not only people but also places
‘travel’ (Strathern 1991). Through migrants’ personal stories I have found that
women’s notions of home change with their migration. By decentring home and
family women modify their behaviour, recreate their identities, and shift subjec-
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tivities, raising an important question about the essentialized association of place and
identity (Elmhirst 2000; Silvey 2000a, 2000b). Migrants changing notions and
associations of place, including home, are apparent in the following migration
accounts.
Changing notions of space and social relations
This section presents the stories of Netti and Tata, who went to Hong Kong as
contract domestic workers. In resonance with other Asian migrant experiences in
which identity as ‘dutiful female family member’ produced a significant economic
motive for migration (Yeoh and Huang 2000: 428), my informants nevertheless
showed wider motives for their sojourn overseas.
For the young women I interviewed, apart from the money, the appeal of transnational migration was the opportunity to escape from family constraints and live in a
different community overseas for an extended period. Others simply wished to experience different spaces and places, ‘to expand their horizons’ (memperluas cakrawala).
In Eastern Indonesia a person is situated relative to others and other things, which are
always changing. In migration, a woman’s position in space moves, so on the one
hand the movement disrupts one level of harmony in her household and kin relations,
but it may also be a journey for wider connections, producing a different kind of
balance. I regard women’s migration as a production of the subjective space of power
(Williams 2003). The cultural meanings of space in everyday life reflect social
relations in the islands, which are constantly negotiated through decisions on mobility.
Women’s migration embodies the dynamic of local culture and relations, in which
there is no fixity of the notion of place and space. The notion of occupying a space
refers to both physical and social location. Therefore a house location in the hamlet
represents a significant social marking of individual or group identity (Tule 2004).
Descent categories (suku) determine different class membership in the community,
which is usually automated by birth. Through migration a woman may establish
herself as a separate subject distinguished from the one she occupies at home.
Sojourning to work abroad for a woman also illuminates subject repositioning and
negotiating marginalities in relation to local practices and discourses. Two main
discourses, local femininity and traditions, constitute propriety. Propriety entails
remaining within the circumscribed boundaries or limits of behaviour. Certain kinds
of migration in the context of contributing to the family income fits with the local
notion of femininity. In effect, it also serves to loosen the grip of male kin’s control
over women’s spatial movement.
Netti and Tata: domestic workers exerting agency
In this section I take my cue from Netti’s personal map, an exceptionally vivid
drawing of her migration as a contract domestic worker in Hong Kong (Figure 2). The
typical journey of a domestic worker going abroad follows several distinctive phases,
each representing a different space – leaving home, in-transit, working abroad, and
returning home.
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Figure 2: Netti’s map
Through my association with the Society of the Divine Word/SVD (a Catholic
religious order) I was introduced to a woman known as a ‘ringleader’ – a former
domestic worker who had become a recruiter. The returned migrants seemed pleased
to share their stories. Netti is typical of the informants who were single and in their
twenties, and previously had no particular skills or job experiences. They have similar
social and economic backgrounds of middle-to-low income families, predominantly
in farming. Before their migration all had been formally unemployed, therefore
financially dependent on their families. All 15 returned migrants that I interviewed,
except one, had attended secondary or high school and two of them had studied at
tertiary level. The secondary level of education of my informants is higher than those
Indonesian women studied by Heyzer and Wee (1994).
Travelling abroad to be a domestic worker reveals a personal, metaphorical
journey of struggle for subjectivity in changing spaces and relations. This is illustrated
in Netti’s sketch map. The figure can be viewed as one mode of cartographic vision,
which resists the mainstream cartography of objectivity and strives to make women’s
space visible with a variety of graphic grids and geometries of experiences and
feelings (Huffman 1997). However, as Domosh (1997) and others remind us, we need
to go beyond understanding the individual experiences, and it is necessary to examine
the conditions under which these processes are produced. When I analyse Netti’s map
within the local historical context it reveals the terms in which this type of migration
is being constructed and performed.
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The departure stage was usually the first hurdle. It involved one of the most
difficult decisions about migrating overseas as it was often the young women’s first
journey away from home. Their attachment to home was related to a particular phase
in their life cycle and, to some extent, a specific subject position as lower status in the
family and kinship hierarchy as an unmarried daughter. Often women who worked as
domestic workers abroad were characterized by very limited resources, in terms of
both their economic and social capital. Although there was a range of experiences
during the departure stage a common thread ran through the beginning of the travel
experiences – an uneasiness regarding their departure reflecting a struggle at the
bodily level.
Netti, and Tata and other informants decided independently to work abroad. When
asked for the reason, superficially they reported similar narratives of ‘helping their
families financially’. They understood that without any experience, they had little
chance locally to secure a suitable job guaranteeing good pay. However there were
other deeper and perhaps more significant personal reasons revealed in their migration
stories. Netti illustrated a process of changing spaces and contour of relations in her
cartography of migration. Her map contains grids of social relations in each phase of
her journey, and it is linked by personal memories, sentiments and feelings. In
essence, the drawing established a view from the inside – which also depicted
conflicting thoughts, mapped significant events, attached a sense of place, and in
particular represented her politics of place.
The stage of leaving home was characterized by a strong feeling of attachment to
her family’s house, ‘my home’ (rumahku) forming the place where most of her
memories are stored (Figure 3). A confused girl is enchantingly shown in front of the
pier. She is about to take a new step, to cross the boundary of the port (dermaga) – a
significant place separating land and ocean. The image of a crucial first step toward
an unfamiliar territory is confirmed in a study by Graham (1999) on Flores which
pinpoints the importance of sea as a threshold. Sea is a source of reference in relation
to others, and it forges connections with outsiders (Graham 1999: 72). Netti’s
important move creating new spaces and forging new, uncertain relations is captured
by her drawing of the threshold between home and away. This illustrates her mixed
emotions of leaving the family home to enter new sets of relations. She was
concerned about community attitudes questioning the bona fide status of her
occupation and both anxious and excited about experiencing new spaces.
As stated, most informants agree that their main motivation for migration is a better
income, a finding that has parallels with many similar studies on overseas domestic
workers (Momsen 1999). Within this broad and generalized motivation nestled a rich
variety of individual reasons. Netti, for example, was part of the first group of women
from her hamlet in the Ende regency in Flores to work overseas. Single, aged 27, and
the second child of a large family of eight, she lived at home with her parents. Her
father owned a small piece of land for subsistence gardening and her mother was a
housewife, helping out in the garden. Netti, like many high school graduates, did not
succeed in finding a job with the local government. She presented her motivation to
work as a domestic worker in Hong Kong as primarily economic, to assist in
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rebuilding her family home after an earthquake. Her narrative also contains a desire
for social mobility to escape the impoverished family way of life as farmers:
My intention to travel started when there was an earthquake in 1992 [in Ende],
and our house was destroyed. I wanted to go and earn money. We would have
liked to start building the house straight away, but we didn’t have the money.
Also, it was always the same thing when we lived with my parents. It was even
harder to ask for some money. My parents grumbled whenever I needed
money. When I finished high school I was unemployed for a while and stayed
home. If I wanted to help and do some work in the [subsistence] garden, it felt
physically too demanding. In the years when we were at school, we didn’t
have to work in the garden. The sun was too hot, I could hardly stand it to
work there.
(Field notes)
Figure 3: ‘My home’: subsection of Netti’s map
When I met Netti in 1999 she had achieved her economic goal. Her family home had
been completely renovated and become one of the most imposing dwellings in the area.
It was reconstructed using bricks and had proper roof tiles rather than the common
thatched roof, and also shiny floor tiles – an unmistakable sign of wealth and prosperity.
When questioned further, many informants indicated varied and deeper personal
reasons for their migration. There was desire to experience different places, to learn
new skills, to meet new people, to spread their wings and ‘to widen their horizon/
perspective’ (memperluas cakrawala). Contract work in particular provides a personal
space by, at least temporarily, creating distance from the family/kin and community
(Barbivc and Miklavvcivc-Brezigar 1999).
Tata, one of Netti’s friends, for instance, was disillusioned with her boyfriend and
sought solace abroad, away from family and friends. Once her relationship with her
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boyfriend was severed, she avoided meeting people in the local community in case
they questioned her about her failed marriage plans. When told by a friend about an
opportunity to become a domestic worker, she needed no further encouragement.
Women were also motivated to leave their rural households for urban households
abroad because it gave them the opportunity to become ‘modern’ or ‘to learn a new
way of living’ among others by gaining familiarity with an urban life style and the
latest appliances (Elmhirst 1999; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Momsen 1999). Many
women I interviewed were proud that they had acquired jeans and a pair of sneakers
as material signs of urban sophistication. This impression differs from the East
Javanese domestic workers (mainly in the Middle East) studied by Heyzer and Wee
(1994) who considered providing for the family and making a pilgrimage to Mecca as
the primary motives. In contrast to their case, the Eastern Indonesian women’s
sojourning as domestic workers shows a combination of reasons as equally important.
While the expression used often pointed to economic factors such as renovating the
family home, or financing sibling education as a primary motivation, when unpacking
their stories further I found that it was rare that one factor predominated. There was a
set of factors closely interconnected, as their personal accounts indicate, triggering
their sojourning. Different stages in the life cycle and the cultural context of areas of
origin as well as different ways of engaging with the women in the research process
may explain the different representations of motivation between East Javanese and
Eastern Indonesian women in these two studies.
Locally, the domestic work profession suffered from an unfortunate association
with the acronym ‘TKW’. TKW is an Indonesian acronym for Tenaga Kerja Wanita
referring to overseas female migrant workers, and particularly those working in
domestic service. In some local dialects of Flores (Nage, Keo and Lio) ‘teka’ (the
pronunciation of TK) means to sell, so the community tended to associate TKW with
prostitution. A community leader in Ende commented that as a father he would never
give his daughter consent for this kind of job because of the association with ‘selling
oneself’. He claimed to know of many cases where daughters simply ran away/escaped
(lari) to work abroad. Parents’ reluctance also stemmed from the community’s negative perception of such work, in turn derived from media representations linking it
with physical and sexual abuses. The Indonesian media reported that between 1997
and 1998 Solidaritas Perempuan (Women’s Solidarity), an NGO observing the plight
of domestic workers, recorded 147 deaths, 180 cases of abuse, and 442 missing
persons among overseas migrant workers. Given these media representations, it was
not surprising that parents were reluctant to allow their daughters to migrate, as
illustrated by an informant’s account:
I planned to go in 1994. However my parents did not agree and they took a lot
of convincing. So I had to wait. My parents were adamant that I finish my
studies and then find suitable work so that our family would amount to something. My father even cried, when he knew of my plan to work as a maid
overseas. I said to him: ‘please don’t cry because I do it to help our family
financially’. My parents had wanted me to stay studying. In my family, no one
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really had a good education. I was about to study at the diploma level [tertiary
level] and became their only hope. When I changed my mind on studying
further [and went abroad instead], they asked me why?
(Field notes)
Women’s agency within the intra-household dynamic emerged in the ways they
negotiate to obtain consent for sojourning abroad, by promising to contribute to the
household income. This image of ‘dutiful daughter’ resonates with migration experience of other Asian women (Barber 2000; Huang et al. 2000; Suzuki 2000). Despite
their fathers’ opposition, women are recruited through an informal network, as they
often know someone who has worked abroad, who became wealthier. Middlemen
(calo) were also known to be aggressively looking for workers in rural areas, meeting
the women’s parents to ask for their consent and promising to send money to the
family at home, in some cases up to Rp 600,000 per month (A$150 in 2000), in
addition to the worker’s monthly salary (Kompas 2000). Mostly for the first-timers,
the family’s consent was given unwillingly, indicating the first step of a metaphorical
journey of a daughter’s struggle for subjectivity and her increasing autonomy. This
occurred with Netti’s parents who worried about her reputation:
One day my parents said that many had commented on my going away, saying
that I had sold myself to prostitution. Here, there is a custom if a single woman
goes away by herself, there is something peculiar about it. It is not good.
Although it is now getting more common for a woman to travel by herself,
going overseas is still a rarity. People inevitably will talk about it.
(Field notes)
Sojourning provided a space to rely on their resourcefulness. A local femininity of
docility and obedience (tunduk dan patuh), traditionally accepted in the place of
origin, lost its intensity with distance in this case. Migration offers a fluid choice of
subject positions among which women’s subjectivity moves. Their shifting subjectivity contains a notion of being aware of their identities as appropriate to particular
local settings as indicated in the next story.
Knowing one’s place
The culmination of the domestic workers sojourning involved working in the houses
of their foreign employers. Most of my informants were conscious of the constraints
imposed by employers and the expectation to work hard. They learnt this through the
informal networks of friends and ex-workers even before arrival. As they were paid
good money for their domestic services, they were ready to work hard. Netti recollected her arrival, wearing her work uniform provided by the employment agency; her
hair was cut short and she wore no make-up. She described her first day working
abroad as ‘being prepared for war’ (siap berjuang). This metaphor of workplace as
battlefield reflects the state officials’ perspective that migrant women are economic
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soldiers deployed to battle against the country’s economic crisis (Chin 1997). A
number of informants attributed their success in dealing with the employers to an
awareness of ‘knowing one’s place’ (tahu menempatkan diri). Others added that
‘knowing how to conduct oneself’ (tahu membawa diri) assists in smoothing their
adjustment to new spaces. Both strategies in everyday practices are significant in
playing the politics of place. The politics of place starts with the body:
I tried to look happy all the time. And I wore neat, appropriate clothes while
working. Therefore I would not annoy them. Even though I was sad at times,
particularly when I missed my family, or got told off for some reason. …
When I could not help it anymore, I had to run off to my room or the
bathroom, closed the door and cried there. They did not like to see me crying
and unhappy because I was told it brings bad luck for the family. In particular
in the period close to the Chinese New Year. I was warned ‘do not to shed a
single tear’ as it chases good luck away.
(Field notes)
Thus choice of clothes, physical/facial appearance and personal control over emotional
outbursts were part of her politics of place in performing roles as a strong, calm and
collected woman, a desirable subject position in the work place. This self-imposed
discipline and decision to appear bright and happy all the time because ‘it made life
easier’ is evidence of an awareness of different roles and positions to suit different
space and time. This further indicates shifting subjectivity embodied in her conduct
and mutually constituted in her migration and relations throughout her journey.
Like other domestic workers, Netti was trusted with running the household, and
taking care of children and elderly parents. She was responsible for shopping for daily
food supplies and deciding the family’s menu. Most importantly, Netti had to attend
to the baby’s needs. The family emphasized that the baby was not only her responsibility but in a sense ‘belonged’ to Netti. The gendered substitution of labour between
the employer and Netti, the employee, was also constructed through multi-layered
emotional relations within the daily life of the family (Gregson and Lowe 1994; Yeoh
and Huang 1999a). Netti expressed satisfaction at being in charge of the baby and of
housekeeping, as an autonomous subject, in a way not normally acknowledged in her
own family and kinship hierarchy in her village in Flores. Although these are still
domestic responsibilities, the meanings attached to her tasks performed as an autonomous subject and the social relations with her employers provide her with more
power than experienced at home (Laurie et al. 1999).
I found the experience of Netti and her counterparts did not necessarily reflect a
fully exploitative relationship. Raharto et al. (1999) found little evidence of abuse and
exploitation of the female transnational migrants from Flores Timur. Therefore, the
uni-dimensional framework of relations of power between employer and foreign
employee is likely not to be sufficient to understand the domestic workers’ sojourning
(Constable 1997; Romero 1992), because there are multi-layered interactions simultaneously enacted and performed by both sides.
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Cases of physical abuse and exploitation, which are regularly reported by the
Indonesian media, were but one part of the relationship. Unlike these reported
victims, Netti negotiated her roles and work and drew considerable benefit from the
relationship with her employer. During Netti’s contract she successfully created a
workable relationship with her employers, and was treated well. Her success in
attending to the everyday needs of the children made her indispensable, an indication
of her successfully playing her politics of place. Thus she was offered more money to
extend her contract, which suggested that she was able to exercise some power in the
relationship with her employer. Indeed, Netti had consciously ingratiated herself into
the family, constantly performing different roles and identities:
Smile was my weapon. As I did not understand many words in Cantonese,
they understandably got upset if I did not follow their instruction to complete
the job. Occasionally the elderly grandmother was dissatisfied with a completed task. I sensed it from her expression. Then I could only force myself to
smile. You could not take things too seriously when they got upset as a result
of misunderstanding. If you made a mistake one day, you learnt from it and
tried to forget about it the next day. … The baby was so attached to me. She
preferred to be with me than her own mother. The family wanted me to stay as
long as possible.
(Field notes)
Everyday relations were punctuated by constant negotiations, as revealed in the
previous stories of Netti and Martha. The women’s strategies to suit different times
and spaces involve being aware of different incidents and the ability to respond
appropriately as part of their politics of place.
Shifting subjectivity
Many Eastern Indonesian women frame their migration around the need to feed and
educate the family, which fits with the expected local femininity. Migration as a
constructed space comprises a range of spatial practices offering a critical distance
and a different perspective as shown by Netti’s experiences of sojourning. The
analysis of Eastern Indonesian women sojourning abroad suggests that mobility
enables a new subject to emerge. Everyday practices of ‘knowing one’s place’ show
women’s agency within the intra-household dynamics and also in the workplace.
Women are engaging in multilevel strategies of making connections with other spaces
and possibilities. Sojourning, as highlighted by migrants’ memories and personal
accounts, not only contains economic motivations but also certain moods of restlessness, circulation, and fragmentation (Baudelaire 1962). Some local men have traditionally been the primary sojourners, and now the sojourning of the women
indicates a shift in the family, kin and community relations. There is considerable
tension inherent in women’s sojourning, as a consequence of the maintenance of local
gendered space.
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Catharina Purwani Williams
As women sojourn, their experience expands from the familiar to the less
familiar and to larger scale social systems of international connections (Thrift 1993).
The motives and experiences are quite diverse. However the women share the
gendered meanings of places within the context of their migration experience. This
transnational mobility is partly an embodied response to the constraint and rigidity
of their subject positions and roles at home and to challenges and opportunities
presented by globalization. As they were situated in the specific historical and cultural
context of East Nusa Tenggara, the sojourn abroad was a significant departure from
the everyday routine of island life, to which each individual woman attached her
own meanings.
Women’s sojourning in this way reflects a negotiation of power at several levels:
the body/autonomy, home/community and the interconnectedness of social groups.
Paying attention to the experience of the body and conditions of social relations
between the women and their families, the community, the globalized employment
agency and employers at each stage of the journey has helped fill a void in our
understanding of women migrants moving through the axis of power. The concrete
and complex conditions of sojourning indicated the emergence of a critical space
enabling shifting subjectivities. Netti and Tata’s experiences of transnational
migration illustrate this point.
Final remarks
This article has elucidated aspects of the transnational migration for Eastern
Indonesian women. However bleak the conditions might appear in the Indonesian
mass media, at one level woman do gain a measure of autonomy of the body from
going through the process of migration. At another level, women are able to make
broader connections to various spaces by widening their subject positions. At the
intersection of the effects of bodily experience and wider subject positions, they
rework their identities enabling shifting subjectivities. Adapting to dynamic new
spaces is part of the migrants’ practices to produce meaning as a part of the household
and local relations. The varied recollections of the women highlight different
relational dynamics of migration. The process of women’s shifting subjectivity
reflects the simultaneity of complex and multi-layered identities resulting from
inhabiting a wider range of subject positions in the process of transnational
migration.
Catharina Purwani Williams
Department of Human Geography
Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies
The Australian National University
ACT 0200
Australia
414
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‘Knowing one’s place’
Acknowledgements
Support of the organizers and participants of the Workshop on Asian Transnational Families is
gratefully acknowledged. Thanks go to Brenda Yeoh, Theodora Lam, Rachel Silvey, Deidre
McKay and Katherine Gibson for support and insightful comments on an earlier manuscript.
The helpful comments of anonymous referees are acknowledged and really appreciated.
Notes
1. See, among others, Constable (1997); Huang et al. (2000); Lawson (1998, 2000); Romero
(1992); Silvey (2000a, 2000b, 2001); Willis and Yeoh (2000); Yeoh and Huang (1999a,
1999b).
2. I translated all of the personal accounts, which were originally in Indonesian. The names of
informants used in the study are pseudonyms.
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