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Christine B.N. Chin
1998
1. Introduction
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By the year 2020, Malaysia can be a united nation, with a confident Malaysian society, infused by strong moral and ethical values, living in a society that is democratic, liberal and tolerant, caring, economically just and equitable, progressive and prosperous, and in full possession of an economy that is competitive, dynamic, robust, and resilient. |
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—Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, 1991 |
| We are part of Vision 2020. Without us, our employers would not be able to work so much. We also contribute to the Malaysian family. |
| —“Anita,” a Filipina domestic worker in Kuala Lumpur, 1994 |
The rapidly industrializing Southeast Asian country of Malaysia plays host to a growing number of Filipina and Indonesian female domestic workers: from a few hundred in the 1970s to approximately 70,000 by 1994. 1 Together with the exponential increase in foreign female domestic workers are two other phenomena that can be discerned readily from a cursory examination of major Malaysian newspapers such as New Straits Times, and The Star. Since the mid 1980s, when state authorities officially began to regulate the in-migration of foreign servants, newspaper articles have portrayed Filipina and Indonesian servants either as house thieves and prostitutes or as victims of horrific forms of sexual and physical assault by their employers.
While newspaper reports graphically detail how some Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers are abused violently by their employers (e.g., servants who are raped, kicked, and/or punched by employers), little is mentioned of the women’s complaints that they are made to sleep on kitchen floors, along corridors, or in storage rooms with no ventilation; that they have to work 18–20 hour days; that they are denied rest days; and that they do not get enough to eat.
With the growing population of transnational migrant domestic labor in the country, police and immigration officials make it a point to ensure law and order by searching for and deporting foreign domestic workers who offer sex-for-sale on their rest days and/or who steal their employers’ belongings. Meanwhile, domestic service remains unlegislated. Employers are rarely, if ever, prosecuted for their abusive actions.
Significantly, there appears to be relatively little public and private concern and outrage with regards to the dehumanizing conditions in which some Filipina and Indonesian domestic servants live and work. During the course of my 1993 visit with family and friends in Kuala Lumpur, I was surprised by the lack of media attention to the welfare of foreign female domestic workers as a group, and also the apathy of fellow Malaysians who employed servants from the neighboring countries of the Philippines and Indonesia. The cause of improving transnational migrant workers’ welfare is left to a small group of activists who are committed to penetrate the wall of silence that surrounds the complaints of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in the country (e.g., lobbying the state for transnational migrant workers’ rights). 2
The contemporary institution of domestic service in Malaysia that, in the last two decades, gradually has been characterized by the in-migration and labor of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers, together with reports of the dehumanizing manner in which some women are treated, elicit compelling theoretico-normative issues. The majority of foreign female domestic workers began arriving on Malaysian soil during the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP) 1971–1990. The NEP was implemented in the aftermath of the 1969 general elections that disintegrated into arguably the one and only mass outbreak of violence between Malays and non-Malays in the country’s modern history. The NEP had an official two-pronged objective: to eradicate poverty and to redress real and perceived interethnic inequalities held over from British colonial rule that left the majority of Malays—the politically and numerically dominant ethnic group in Malaysia—primarily associated with a rural subsistence lifestyle while the more modern urban areas and occupations were perceived to be dominated by non-Malays, namely the Chinese. Subsequently, the NEP encouraged Malay urban in-migration while it instituted a quota system for Malays in most areas of social life, e.g., education, employment, and banking/finance.
The in-migration of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers that began during the NEP’s era of state-led socioeconomic restructuring continues today. The present National Development Policy (NDP) 1991–2000 is a continuation of the NEP, albeit with an even greater emphasis on export-oriented development in which open markets and free trade are considered the major avenues to sustaining economic growth.
According to the current Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, the ultimate objective of export-oriented development is to realize “Wawasan 2020”/Vision 2020, or what I call the Malaysian state’s “modernity project.” The modernity project involves constructing a developed multiethnic Malaysian society with the “caring family” as its social base:
[W]e should aim for is a Malaysia that is a fully developed country by year 2020. . . . By the year 2020, Malaysia can be a united nation, with a confident Malaysian society, infused by strong and ethical values, living in a society that is democratic, liberal and tolerant, caring. . . . [T]he challenge of establishing a fully caring society and a caring culture, a social system in which society will come before self, in which the welfare of the people will revolve not around the state or the individual but around a strong and resilient family system. . . . [T]he challenge of establishing a prosperous society with an economy that is fully competitive, dynamic, robust and resilient. 3
Table 1.1
Malaysia Basic Indicators
| Year | Population (’000) |
Urban Population % of Total |
Current per Capita (US$) |
Labor Force Total Female |
GDP Average Annual Growth % |
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| (’000) | % | 1970–80 | 1980–92* | ||||
| 1973 | 11,675 | 36.0 | 600 | 4,131.3 | 32.3 | ||
| 1980 | 13,763 | 42.0 | 1800 | 5,337.4 | 34.6 | 7.9 | |
| 1990 | 17,671 | 49.8 | 2400 | 7,071.1 | 35.1 | ||
| 1993 | 19.047 | 52.1 | 3140 | 7,652.7 | 35.4 | 6.2 | |
Source: World Bank, 1995.
* The 1980-92 average includes the 1985-87 recessionary period. In the 1990s the average annual growth is approximately 8 percent.
In the context of the modernity project, “Anita” a Filipina domestic worker stated in a 1994 newspaper interview that foreign female domestic workers were important to the Malaysian family, hence Vision 2020. Introduced as one of the epigraphs in this chapter, her remark that Filipina servants facilitate the realization of the modern Malaysian family, was made in relation to Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ complaints of mistreatment and abuse at the hands of Malaysian employers. 4
This study, which analyzes the relationship between transnational migrant female domestic labor and the political economy of development in Malaysia, is informed by two central questions. Why is unlegislated live-in domestic service, an essentially premodern social institution and peopled mostly by female domestic workers from the Philippines and Indonesia, increasingly prevalent in the context of constructing a modern developed Malaysian society by way of export-oriented development? If the in-migration of foreign female domestic workers is important to nurturing the modern caring Malaysian family—at the very least by way of substituting for the domestic labor of working Malaysian mothers—then why is there an overall absence of public and private concern regarding the less-than-human conditions in which some Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers exchange labor for wages?
A “problem-solving” approach to these questions would provide immediate answers. It can be said that foreign female domestic workers’ presence in Malaysia is a consequence of transnational wage differentials that encourage migration-for-employment; that Malaysian demands for Filipina and Indonesian servants result from enhanced personal purchasing powers during a period of declining supply in local servants; and that employer insensitivities can and do lead to the abuse of foreign domestic workers. Taken to its logical conclusion, the attendant solutions are not without merit. Economic growth should be strengthened in labor-sending countries to equalize wage differentials; Malaysians should be trained to better supervise foreign servants, encouraged to use childcare centers and/or to hire part-time or day servants; and domestic service should be legislated to protect servants from abuse.
Defining one of the problems and solutions in terms of transnational wage differentials, however, sidesteps the need to explain how and why states have become actively involved in facilitating labor migration, not to mention that efforts to equalize wage differentials mostly will have the effect of alleviating the symptoms and not the larger structural constraints of global and regional economies from which emerges the phenomenon of transnational migration-for-employment. Similarly, the solutions of legislating domestic service and training employers neither explains how and why employers may and do abuse foreign domestic workers nor the real or perceived need for servants, especially from the Philippines and Indonesia.
The major limitations of a problem-solving approach are conceptual parameters that privilege ahistoricity, and that divide social life into discrete, mutually exclusive dimensions and levels which have little bearing on one another. It is assumed that a problem in any dimension and level of social life can be isolated and dealt with singularly, immediately and effectively. As Robert W. Cox argues in his discussion of the differences between problem-solving and critical theories:
There is problem-solving theory which takes the present as given and reasons about how to deal with particular problems within the existing order of things. Then there is . . . critical theory . . . [which] stands back . . . to ask how that order came about, how it may be changing, and how the changes may be influenced or challenged. Where problem-solving focuses synchronically upon the immediate and reasons in terms of fixed relationships, critical theory works in a more historical and diachronic dimension. Its aim is the understanding of structural change [emphasis mine]. 5
I adopt, in this study, a critical interdisciplinary approach to examine the relationship between domestic service and a development path that is constituted by and that constitutes responses of the state elite and private citizens to forces of change on, as well as interactions among the transnational, national, and household levels. The conceptual framework, which locates the performance and consumption of paid reproductive labor in the midst of various dimensions of development within and beyond Malaysia, allows me to explain how and why contemporary domestic service has become an integral component in efforts by the Malaysian state elite to garner consent from key social forces for the construction of a developed socially stable multiethnic polity.
The “Good Life”: Integrating the Politics of Governance with the Politics of Social Reproduction
To propose that the politics of governance are related to the politics of social reproduction (i.e., who does what aspect of reproductive labor, under what conditions, and in what kind of family form), is to insist that the Malaysian state actively shapes the demands for, and the consequent in-migratory and employment structures and processes of, female domestic workers from the neighboring Southeast Asian countries of the Philippines and Indonesia. 6 The question is how, why, and with what consequences?
Existing scholarship of changing state-society relations in rapidly industrializing Asian countries continues to ignore the relevance of paid reproductive labor to the unfolding of late-twentieth-century modernity. For the last two decades, sustained economic growth in Asia has strengthened scholarly interest in how Asian states bring about and manage rapid industrialization. Borrowing from critical scholarship on the political economy of Latin America, the model of the developmental state is used by some scholars of Asian political economy to explain the state’s involvement in the economy and society: “The conceptualization of a ‘developmental state’ focuses on the political will, the ideological coherence, the bureaucratic instruments, and the repressive capacity to formulate and implement effective economic policies to promote high speed capitalist growth.” 7
The developmental state is conceptualized as “an amalgam of social, political, ideological and economic elements organised in a particular manner.” 8 It is not a neutral entity but an expression of power embedded in complex overlapping social networks. Institutionalized state power is embodied in the bureaucratic, coercive, and judicial arms that constitute the state apparatus.
The coercive-repressive dimension of the developmental state is considered an important independent variable in the restructuring of the economy. In rapidly industrializing Asian countries, the state’s coercive-repressive power is seen to be increasingly class-based, and in some cases, racialized-ethnicized. Yet, the centrality of scholarly focus on legislation that coerces big business to behave in distinct ways to capture transnational capital and markets, and that represses dissent from various oppositional groups in society, cannot adequately account for continued economic success and social order. 9
Coercive-repressive legislation is designed to do just that: coerce and repress. It is not intended to fundamentally alter peoples’ values, beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, and behavior. Intellectual inquiry of state-society relations in rapidly industrializing Asia has not examined the more surreptitious ways in which the state elite implement policies to construct consent among new social forces that are engendered by industrialization and that have the potential to challenge state legitimacy.
Emphasis placed on the class and/or racial-ethnic dimension of the developmental state has obscured an equally important and related modality of identity and power, i.e., gender. Analyses of the gendering of the developmental state—in which the state apparatus is controlled mainly by elite men from various racial-ethnic backgrounds who conceptualize and implement policies and legislation—can contribute to a deeper understanding of strategies of coercion and consent that are used to maintain social order.
The phenomenon of state-supported transnationalization of migrant female domestic labor since the 1970s deserves closer attention than is given by critical political economists of Asian state-society relations. 10 The ways in which labor migration are incorporated in development policies can point researchers in the direction of identifying the more surreptitious strategies of consent—implicating the state elite and apparatus in the changing form and content of domestic service—that help normalize different forms of social relations and organization in society to support export-oriented growth, hence reinforce state legitimacy. Such strategies can and do involve official, albeit covert, manipulation of the various dimensions of identity formation, maintenance, or transformation that affect the nature and path of development.
On the other hand, and until recently, scholarship of domestic service, or the performance and consumption of paid household labor in most regions of the world, has been informed by conceptual frameworks or templates that focus mostly on employer-domestic worker relations. Absent from many but not all of these studies are conceptualizations of state involvement in the changing form and content of domestic service. 11 A key consequence of this is the lost opportunity to explicate the evolving gender-class-racial/ethnic dimensions of the state.
I am not suggesting that inquiries of employer-domestic worker relations in the West and elsewhere that have yielded knowledge of gender, class, and racial-ethnic negotiations of power in the household are no longer appropriate or relevant to conceptualizing and researching contemporary domestic service. On the contrary, given that foreign female domestic workers increasingly are found throughout Asia, the Middle East, Western Europe, and North America, it is to be expected that analyses of employer-domestic worker relations will enhance our understanding of the construction and exercise of power that is circumscribed by specific intersections of nationality, gender, class, race/ethnicity, and religion in the private or domestic domain. My point is that many of the existing templates (including those that examine the changing form and content of domestic service as a particular indicator of gendered capitalist development paths in the so-called Third World which leave open little more than jobs as servants for local and foreign migrant women) have not fully explored or conceptualized the state’s involvement in shaping contemporary domestic service. 12 This serves to reinforce the persistent and unstated assumption within academic circles and in everyday life that domestic service is a mostly personal-private issue best left to feminists who analyze negotiations of power in the household. 13 Implicit in this assumption is the notion that while transformations in domestic service are a consequence of economic development, they remain unrelated to the conceivably more important topic of the politics of governance.
The failure of literature on the political economy of rapid industrialization, and on domestic service to theoretically and normatively account for multicausal linkages among the regional, national, and household levels leaves us with an implicit picture of the state as a protector and perpetrator of capitalist-patriarchal and/or racial-ethnic ideologies. We still do not fully know why, how, and with what consequences policies that directly and indirectly encourage demands for paid reproductive labor shape the lives of female employer-supervisors and foreign servants in particular, and in general, the development path along which society is encouraged to evolve.
State-supported transnationalization of migrant female domestic labor today more clearly implicates the labor-sending and labor-receiving state elite and apparatus in the changing form and content of domestic service. Why do states encourage the out- and in-migration of female servants rather than male servants? Is it merely an issue of labor demand and supply? Or does the transnational migration of female servants also facilitate labor-sending and labor-receiving states’ explicit and/or implicit economic and noneconomic objectives? 14
Analyses of the transition from local to foreign domestic workers can reveal even more than the knowledge that paid reproductive labor is characterized by specific intersections of nationality, gender, class, and race-ethnicity. Especially given contemporary high levels of economic interpenetration, the boundaries separating phenomena within and beyond specific geopolitical borders are blurred. As one consequence, it is increasingly difficult to sustain the argument that the practices of “private” and “public patriarchy” are mutually exclusive. 15 Our understanding of social life at the household or national levels then must take into consideration forces that interpenetrate them. Feminist scholars of International Relations such as Cynthia Enloe and J. Ann Tickner continue to stress this point with regards to the complex and intimate relationship between gender, and household, national, and international politics. 16
Contemporary domestic service can be and is related to the issue of governance, i.e., how and why labor migration policies become part of efforts among the labor-sending state elite to maintain legitimacy while they restructure the economy to facilitate open markets and free trade, including the trade in female domestic workers. At the labor-receiving end, official regulation of the in-migration and employment of foreign female domestic workers indicates that contemporary domestic service is intricately tied to the negotiation of legitimacy between the state elite and key social forces, particularly the employing social class(es).
There exists a relatively small but growing body of literature on the state’s relation to foreign female domestic workers in the advanced industrialized world. The United States and Canada, for example, in order to encourage the legal in-migration of foreign female domestic workers (especially from the Caribbean and Central America) at least as a partial solution to middle-class pressure for the provision of childcare services, have constructed immigration rules that bind foreign domestic workers to their employers for a specified time period. 17 As Sedef Arat-Koc argues in the context of foreign female domestic workers’ relation to the Canadian state:
The state plays an active role in structuring and controlling not only the volume but also the conditions of these workers. There is a striking contrast between the laissez faire approach that the liberal state has taken, which favours private solutions to problems in the domestic sphere, and its rigid intervention in the provision, organization and control of ‘help’ for that sphere. Given the specific combination of state policies in areas of child care provision, labor legislation and immigration, domestic service is not simply a private but a politically constructed solution to the crisis of the domestic sphere. 18
In North America, the politico-economic motives of the state elite are seen to contribute to the ongoing gendered, racialized-ethnicized, and class-based nature in the performance and consumption of live-in paid housework. 19
The study of contemporary domestic service that is characterized by transnational migrant domestic labor offers a monumental opportunity to conceptually bridge the household, national, regional, and global levels on the basis of the construction and pursuit of what can be called the “good life.” In the present context of the global expansion of neoliberalism, the state elite have the task of negotiating effectively between demands that emanate both from within and from beyond geopolitical borders. 20 Particularly given neoliberalism’s promise that open markets and free trade are the most viable and natural routes to what Jeremy Bentham, in the eighteenth century, called the pursuit of the real and perceived “greatest happiness of the greatest number [of peoples],” contemporary legislation and policies have to be designed to encourage the emergence of a shared vision and ways to achieve this vision with key social forces. 21 The shared vision, to be sure, partly is constituted for countries that are in the processes of liberalizing, deregulating, and/or privatizing national economies.
In most countries, since the state apparatus is grounded in particular intersections of class-based, gendered and racialized-ethnicized power, then so will be the definition and pursuit of the good life in today’s world. Yet, neoliberalism’s blueprint for development obscures this foundational proposition by ignoring different conceptualizations of development and by conflating the complexity and multidimensionality of development structures and processes with economic success. Success is measured by a series of indicators such as percentage of sustained annual economic growth, per capita income, level of savings and investment, and debt-GNP ratio to debt-export ratios. 22
The pursuit of the “good life,” real or perceived, continues at all levels to revolve around an emphasis on more efficient ways to generate, accumulate, and utilize material wealth. According to this schema, whatever facilitates the pursuit of the good life on all levels is promoted as, and coterminous with, whatever is morally acceptable.
The raison d’être of the contemporary state has become the ability to provide the context for, and to convince citizens to pursue and to realize, neoliberalism’s version of the good life. Utility becomes the principal legitimating moral criterion on which are justified methods employed in the pursuit of the good life: i.e., an action or a policy is valid if it brings about responses that are favorable to the actor. 23 In spite of how structural adjustment and stabilization policies marginalize peoples from certain classes, racial-ethnic groups, and gender, state elites in the developing world (at the insistence and with the help of the World Bank, the IMF, and the OECD) continue to restructure their economies to facilitate the unobstructed movement of transnational capital. 24 It is assumed that all peoples want to and will achieve neoliberalism’s promise and version of the good life.
To be sure, not all peoples agree to this definition of the good life. The gendered, racialized-ethnicized, and class-based dimensions of the exercise of state power in the service of neoliberal utilitarianism (or, in Gramscian terms, the “hegemonic historic bloc”) continues to be challenged by different groups of peoples in different ways (“counterhegemonic historic bloc”), e.g., feminists, environmentalists, human rights activists, and Islamicists operating on the local, national, and transnational levels. 25
If state legitimacy is to be maintained, then key social forces somehow must be encouraged to share a similar vision of the good life and ways to pursue it. Strategies of coercion-repression can be used to silence dissent. Nonetheless, it is the strategies of garnering consent that facilitate the construction and/or maintenance of a shared vision between those who govern and those who are governed.
To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, the state is both repressor and educator. Especially in periods of rapid social change, strategies of coercion-repression silence dissent while strategies of consent proceed less coercively, if not unobtrusively, to encourage peoples to adopt different perceptions, values, and/or forms of social relations and organizations. 26 Significantly, the processes of educating a new form of citizenry might be made free of class-based, nationalistic, gendered and/or racialized-ethnicized ideologies; but they are not.
Implicit in my study is a detailed exposition of the gendering of state power and apparatus in relation to contemporary domestic service. The analysis is made even more compelling because the construction and pursuit of the good life in Malaysia must take into account two interrelated factors: the regional context of Southeast Asian interstate competition in capturing transnational capital and markets, and the modern Malaysian history of interethnic material and symbolic contestations that have shaped nearly every, if not all, aspects of social life.
Finding the State in the Family: Consumption of Paid Reproductive Labor and the Construction of Middle-Class Hood
If every State tends to create and maintain a certain type of civilization and of citizen (and hence of collective life and of individual relations), and to eliminate certain customs and attitudes and to disseminate others, then the Law will be its instrument for this purpose (together with the school system, and other institutions and activities) . . . In reality, the State must be conceived of as an “educator,” in as much as it tends precisely to create a new type and level of civilization.
—Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebook, 1971
Historically, the emergence of the middle classes, along with their politics, have affected the adoption of different development paths and forms of state. 27 This point is not any less important today, especially since the growth of the middle classes in Asia has been linked intimately to changing forms of state. In countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, the middle classes are seen to have spearheaded successfully demands for political democratization, while there is no indication that the middle classes in other Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore are about to follow suit.
Conceptually, the middle classes continue to present a challenge for Neo-Marxist and Neo-Weberian class theorists since members of the middle classes range from school teachers and low-level bureaucrats to lawyers, computer scientists, and owners of small businesses (see chapter 6). 28 To reflect the heterogeneity of those located at various points between the capitalist and the proletarian or between the upper and lower classes, I consistently use the phrase in its plural form, the “middle classes.”
That the middle classes are a consequence of, and an important factor in, shaping the political economy of rapid industrialization is not the immediate issue here. Rather, the issue is how and why the state elite devise strategies of consent to police middle-class identities and politics. The potential of the expanding middle classes to strengthen the path of export-oriented development in Malaysia is indirectly acknowledged in official discourse: “Recognizing that a larger population constitutes an important human resource to create a larger consumer base with an increasing purchasing power [emphasis mine] to generate and support industrial growth through productive exploitation of natural resources, Malaysia could, therefore, plan for a larger population which could ultimately reach 70 million.” 29 Indeed, contemporary capitalist development necessitates the restructuring of social relations and organizations, especially peoples’ relation to production and consumption processes. 30
Especially in Malaysia, the middle classes increasingly place an emphasis on what Pierre Bourdieu called the “pursuit of distinction,” in which the consumption of goods and services are seen as a key way to construct identities and lifestyles that distinguish them from the lower or working classes. 31 Analysis of contemporary domestic service and development in Malaysia or other labor-receiving countries ought to be located in the context of the state elite’s relation to the employing social classes or the middle classes in general, and changing middle-class consumption patterns in particular. Malaysian demands for transnational migrant domestic labor signal that such changes are occurring visibly at the level of the family or the household.
It also should be noted that throughout this study, I frequently and deliberately use the noun “family” as opposed to “household” even though I am aware that the more critically oriented feminist scholarship objects to the use of the former noun in relation to discourse on social relations in the domestic domain since it reinforces patriarchal-capitalist ideology that legitimates the husband as the main wage-earner and the wife as the home-maker. The uncritical use of the noun “family” can and does mystify the nature of unpaid reproductive labor that is performed by the wife. I, most certainly, do not take issue with this position. Rather, the noun “family” is used to emphasize specifically the Malaysian state’s ideological position toward constructing a modern Malaysian middle-class family in which men, in theory, remain the main wage-earners while women assume the responsibility for performing housework or supervising servants. When the noun “household” is used in this study, it refers to the level of analysis at which a servant works for and resides with the employing family. 32
According to the schema of the public-private dichotomy, the reach of the state apparatus does not and cannot extend to the innermost sanctum of society, i.e., the family. Unlike this picture drawn by classical philosophers of the family as an entity located in the private emotive realm secluded from activities in public space, the institution of the family has and continues to be an intricate component in the processes of state formation, maintenance, and/or disintegration. 33
At the most fundamental level, the state is involved in the definition of what constitutes a family, marriage, and parenthood. What counts as genuine and legal marriage, the claims of “natural” as against step parents, definitions of dependents, family, and household are all called upon the framing of legislation. . . . Thus, the basic coinage of family relations, the understanding of the central terms of marriage, family . . . are built into the relationships between state and the family. In an important sense, the state is a key agency in telling and reminding us what the family is. 34
If the state is to maintain the cohesion of its historic bloc that binds social forces, then it relates to families from different classes in different ways. Jacques Donzelot and Christopher Lasch have argued in different contexts that state elites in the West directly and indirectly promote the development of particular models of science, education, law, and medicine that construct new forms of citizenry to achieve social order within different historical contexts. For instance, in France during the ancien régime, the state governed through the family by investing the patriarch of the household with respect, status, and protection. In return, the patriarch provided labor, revenue, and “faithfulness to public order.” 35 Today in the United States, welfare agencies that regulate Medicaid or Food Stamp programs are designed, in theory, to help the working poor. In practice, agencies’ rules of eligibility constitute and reinforce particular types of family structures for the poor. 36
Demands for paid reproductive labor can be influenced by way of legislating (or not legislating) areas of social life that, in turn, affect peoples’ real and perceived need for domestic servants. The analysis in this study ascertains that by enframing the larger possible fields of actions and responses in which peoples live and interact, the Malaysian state elite are able to coopt domestic service as a key educative institution to encourage and legitimize the middle classes’ adoption of the nuclear family form. It is “educative” in the Gramscian sense, in that legislation and policies on various aspects of social life, including the in-migration and employment of foreign female domestic workers, covertly or surreptitiously socialize peoples into different ways of perceiving and organizing social relations. 37
The implementation of the NEP during the 1970s, i.e., in the midst of what some would call the emerging New International Division of Labour, opened the window of opportunity for greater state involvement in shaping the middle-class family. The supply of Malaysian servants declined as newly built factories owned by transnational corporations demanded female factory workers. By refusing to legislate domestic service, state authorities hastened the decline as young Malaysian Malay, Chinese, and Indian women elected to work in factories that paid higher wages and that offered more structured work environments with clearly defined rest periods and rest days.
Encouraged by the transnationalization of migrant female domestic labor, Malaysian employers began to hire servants from the Philippines and Indonesia. Immigration, child care, employment, reproduction, and personal income tax legislation and policies affect everyday life in a way that continues to fuel Malaysian demands for foreign female domestic workers.
By the mid 1980s, Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers were key to the state elite’s defense of the NEP as migrant women became boundary markers for and of the expanding Malaysian middle classes. Official regulation of the in-migration of foreign female domestic workers led to the construction of rules that govern Malaysian employment Filipina and Indonesian servants. Of importance is that the in-migration of servants from other labor-sending countries is discouraged partly because of the politics of population distribution in multiethnic Malaysia.
A key strategy of garnering consent was embodied in employment rules which objectified the social and material boundaries of the Malay and non-Malay middle classes. By delineating entry into the community of the expanding Malaysian middle classes, the rules indirectly addressed criticisms from certain groups within society that the NEP had not benefitted the majority of Malays in particular, and Malaysians in general.
The employment rules also insisted on Malay and non-Malay middle-class adoption of the nuclear family form. On the normative level, the middle-class nuclear family “(re)drafts morality” by emphasizing women’s reproductive roles as wives and mothers who also supervise foreign female domestic workers. 38 On the political economic level, the middle-class nuclear family strengthens the growth of capitalist markets as members of the nuclear family are expected to be more dependent on the capitalist market than on the extended community or family for the provision of goods and services. Middle-class consumption of foreign female domestic workers’ labor (provided by the transnational capitalist labor market in domestic servants) is part of the Malaysian state elite’s promotion of enhanced middle-class consumption of goods and services as symbolic of personal and national progress.
The pursuit of “modernity via consumption,” of which the performance and consumption of paid reproductive labor is a part, facilitates the development of a particular kind of “middle class-hood” in Malaysia that is not premised exclusively on ethnic, cultural, and religious differences. Malaysian Malay, Chinese, and Indian middle-class employers of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers increasingly construct a similarly distinctive lifestyle of consuming goods and services. To a great extent, contemporary state apparatus and power are gendered without regard to ethnicity in the efforts to police the Malaysian middle classes.
Direct and indirect state support for Malaysian employment of Filipina and Indonesian female domestic workers continues to have negative consequences on the lives of migrant women. Growing demands for foreign domestic workers have given rise to and sustain a transnational “trade in maids,” in which migrant women are “exported and imported,” and bought and sold, like consumer goods. The dehumanization of foreign female domestic workers is constituted and reinforced by the interplay between the maid trade; the unlegislated status of domestic service; and the manner in which state authorities—in an effort to control the public activities of tens of thousands of migrant women—contribute to negative public and private discourse, perception, and treatment of foreign female domestic workers. Reports of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ deplorable working conditions (e.g., emotional, physical, economic, and sexual subordination) are not matched by public outcry to legislate domestic service or to punish abusive employers.
The principle of utility that inheres in the global expansion of neoliberalism influences, and is reinforced in, the development path of Malaysia. Filipina and Indonesian female domestic workers’ presence in the country, and especially their responses to inhumane and inhuman working conditions, highlight the extent to which utilitarianism has penetrated the many dimensions of social life to become a key principal legitimating moral criterion that guides social actions and interactions. Benefits accrued to the state and the middle classes from foreign female domestic workers’ presence in Malaysia is perceived to far outweigh the negative aspects of employer-foreign servant relations, if not to naturalize public acceptance of reported and unreported incidences of employer abuse. In a multiethnic context, the official policy of restricting foreign female domestic workers’ movement in public space is justified to ensure social order. Domestic employment agencies and employers are complicit, for example, in denying Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers rest days to prevent them from being exposed to criminal elements beyond the home. Employers who provide foreign domestic workers with board and lodging in addition to wages expect and insist that servants earn their keep by working longer hours, and sleeping and eating less.
Malaysian employers and society-at-large remain generally silent on the servitude of foreign female domestic workers. The interests of the state elite and the Malaysian middle classes have converged in a way that perpetuates the silence, since the plights of many foreign female domestic workers are deemed inconsequential to the modernity project of Wawasan 2020. The mistreatment and abuse of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers are rationalized as valid and moral because the women are not considered and treated as human beings, but as objects to be controlled for order, sold for profit, and consumed for status.
Transnational migrant female domestic labor has become an integral component in the state elite’s strategy of garnering consent for export-oriented development. Today, the service and servitude of foreign female domestic workers result from, and contribute to, the modernity project of nurturing the continued growth of the Malaysian middle classes, and legitimizing the form of the middle-class nuclear family—irrespective of ethnicity—as the foundation of and for a modern multiethnic polity.
The Creation or Recovery of Knowledge in an Era of Neoliberalism
“‘How you must envy my delighted existence!’ it [a frog in a broken-down well] said to the giant turtle of the Eastern Sea. ‘If I want to go out, I jump along the railing around the well, then I come back and rest where the brick lining is missing from the wall. . . . Turning around, I see crayfish and tadpoles, but none of them is a match for me. Furthermore, I have sole possession of all the water in this hole and straddle all the joy in this broken-down well. This is the ultimate! Why don’t you drop in some time, sir, and see for yourself?’ ” But before the turtle of the Eastern Sea could get his left foot in, his right knee had already gotten stuck. After extricating himself, he withdrew a little and told the frog about the sea, saying, ‘A distance of a thousand tricents is insufficient to span its breadth; a height of a thousand fathoms is insufficient to plumb its depth. During Yu’s time, there were floods nine years out of ten, but the water in it did not appreciably increase; during Tang’s time, there were droughts seven years out of eight, but the extent of the shores did not appreciably decrease . . . [T]his is the great joy of the Eastern Sea. ‘Upon hearing this, the frog in the broken-down well was so utterly startled that it lost itself in bewilderment.’”
—Master Chuang Chuang Tzu, circa 350 B.C.
To reiterate, this study is informed and driven by the interest in the critical analysis of the identification, formation, and maintenance of social institutions and structures that are shaped by and that shape human beliefs, values, attitudes, perceptions, and interactions. Of increasing interest today is the seemingly natural global expansion of capitalist free markets. The phenomenon of economic liberalization, privatization, and deregulation throughout the world may well lead peoples to perceive capitalist expansion as if it were part of the natural order of social life in the sense that human beings are inherently inclined toward the accumulation of wealth. Therefore, many practitioners and supporters of neoliberalism have come to believe that state intervention in economies can only obstruct this law of nature.
However, the capitalist orientation of social life is not natural as if it were the result of human nature per se. It is natural only so long as we understand that particular patterned behavior and interactions in the Euro-American world gave rise to institutions and structures that, over time, were naturalized and objectivated throughout the rest of the world. The objectivation and expansion of distinct beliefs, values, attitudes, perceptions, and interactions between the material and nonmaterial world appear to make natural the capitalist orientation of social life. 39 Critical analysis is designed to “deconstruct” this objective world to reveal the bases, and on many occasions, the unequal distributions and exercises of power that inhere in social relations, institutions, and structures. 40
The process of critical analysis insists on a diachronic approach to the study of any “sphere of human activity.” Equally important, critical analysis involves the examination, and if appropriate, the consequent need to redress prevailing (dominant) ways in which scholars problematize issues: “Critical theory is directed to the social and political complex as a whole rather than the separate parts . . . [and] leads toward the construction of a larger picture of the whole of which the initially contemplated part is just one component, and seeks to understand the processes of change in which both parts and whole are involved.” 41
From this perspective, analysis of domestic service that focuses exclusively on employer-domestic worker relations in the household is conceptualized within the larger national and regional contexts in which the relationship occurs. To do so is not to undermine the importance and centrality of employer-domestic worker relations per se, but to be able to identify and understand a myriad of forces interacting across regional, national, and household levels that shape the relationship. In chapter 2, I offer a discussion of the historico-empirical foundation for the argument that the Malaysian state elite rely on strategies of coercion and consent to restructure the economy and society. Analyses of the respective waves of low-wage migrant labor during the colonial and postcolonial periods are integrated in the discussion to explicate the relation between migrant labor and strategies of consent.
Having established the larger context for the contemporary in-migration of foreign workers per se, the discussion is narrowed considerably in chapter 3, which examines the historical relation between the state and the institution of domestic service. I ask and answer the question as to how and why personnel changes in domestic service were distinguished first with the displacement of foreign male servants by foreign female servants during the 1930s, and eventually, the substitution of foreign female domestic workers for the labor of their Malaysian counterparts in the late twentieth century. This is followed by an analysis of the reasons underlying state regulation of the in-migration and placement of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysian households. The key argument in this chapter is that specific employment rules facilitated the objectivation of the social and material boundaries of the middle classes in response to public criticisms that development had not benefitted the majority of Malaysians.
Chapter 4 begins with the global context out of which occurs the contemporary state-supported transnationalization of migrant labor. The key actors involved in the Malaysian-Philippine-Indonesian “maid trade” are identified, and their actions and policies are discussed in relation to foreign female domestic workers’ migratory and employment chain. This chapter demonstrates that the transnational labor market in foreign female domestic workers did not arise “naturally.” Rather, it is actively constructed and maintained by state and nonstate actors. In the maid trade, many Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers are viewed and treated as children at best, and as commodities at worst in the exchange of servants for cash on the transnational domestic labor market.
The focus in chapter 5 expands on the theme of the dehumanization of foreign female domestic workers by providing an analysis of employer-servant relations on the household level. In this chapter, employer-servant relations are conceptualized from the perspective of the “public” and “hidden” transcripts of domestic service, i.e., the public/observable deference of foreign female domestic workers in their relationship with employers (“public” transcript) is juxtaposed with what foreign servants say and do when they are away from their workplace (“hidden” transcript). 42 Various methods of supervision and surveillance are found to be constitutive of the processes of the construction of middle-class identity in the household, and subsequent acts of employer-related mistreatment and abuse. Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers, however, are not entirely passive or powerless in their responses to abusive employers. Their strategies of negotiating and renegotiating control over the use of time and space are identified and analyzed.
Chapter 6 provides a more in-depth discussion on Malaysian demands for transnational migrant domestic labor, and the manner in which the employing social classes and the public-at-large have been able to ignore the mistreatment and abuse of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. The interplay between the socioeconomic requirements and consequences of export-oriented development in Malaysia, and prevailing Asian patriarchal attitudes toward middle-class Malaysian women, make inevitable middle-class families’ demands that domestic workers facilitate the construction and pursuit of the good life. I revisit the Immigration Department’s rules governing the employment of domestic workers within the context of policies and legislation designed to (re)construct middle-class women’s roles and status within the nuclear family form, and to legitimize the notion of “modernity via consumption.”
Chapter 7 concludes with a summary of the major arguments in this study and offers a critique of utility as a guiding moral principle in the conduct of the everyday life of the Malaysian middle classes.
Forays Into the Field: The Field Research Process
Words are for catching ideas; once you’ve caught the idea, you can forget about the words. Where can I find a person who knows how to forget about words so that I can have a few words with him [her]?
—Master Chuang Chuang Tzu, circa 350 B.C.
The methodological approach taken is that of a nonpositivist manner of recovering and generating knowledge pertaining to the relationship between contemporary domestic service and the political economy of development in Malaysia. This is not to say that methods such as attitudinal surveys will not aid in the task of identifying factors that lead to Malaysian demands for and eventual employment of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. Nonetheless, surveys can constrain our ability to understand the complexity of various forces at work in shaping the performance and consumption of paid reproductive labor since, “[S]urveys are also limited instruments. One limitation is the fact that they oversimplify complex issues by reducing them to the responses to a limited number of questions.” 43
Feminist inquiry that remains within the boundaries of positivism insists that a feminist reinterpretation of the scientific method rectifies many androcentric biases. It is argued that the context of discovery is as equally important as the context of justification, i.e., making clear the researcher’s identity will lead to a more objective study. While I support the move to acknowledge the researcher’s identity (gender, nationality, ideological position, and so forth), we still would labor under the illusion in which the complexities of social life can be distilled into a series of hypotheses and categories to be tested, and the ensuing results effectively lauded as “truth.”
There also was a practical consideration that mitigated the use of survey instruments. In 1993, while I was visiting family and friends in Kuala Lumpur, I became acutely aware not only of the presence of foreign female domestic workers in Malaysia, but also of the refusal by many employers to even speak about domestic service, let alone answer a list of prepared questions (see preface). Students at Universiti Malaya who had conducted or were in the process of conducting surveys of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers, and activists from nongovernmental organizations that offered counseling services to abused foreign domestic workers, complained of the difficulty in gaining access to this population as a whole and in convincing migrant women to answer surveys.
I elected instead to conduct multimethod ethnographic research—archival analysis, observation, and interviews—that would help construct a picture of domestic service in which are embedded various dimensions of the lives of employers and domestic workers. It can be said that interviews conducted within the framework of ethnographic research are unscientific in the sense that there is no way to evaluate the validity and replicability of the data. I concede that this argument, indeed, is valid if the assumption is that the many different and complex ways in which social actors, in their everyday lives, perceive and interact with their environment are accessible to formal social scientific inquiry. This study follows the guidelines established for ethnographic validity: i.e., to make explicit the relation between theory and ethnographic methods, or “theoretical candor”; to map the “ethnographer’s path”; and to offer extensive “fieldnote quotations” as evidence. 44
A key intent in this study was to capture, as much as possible, the structural impact of development on the lives of employers and foreign female domestic workers in their own words. My refusal to structure the question-answer sessions, choosing instead to allow employers and domestic workers the right to speak about any issue they so pleased, produced a wealth of information on the ways in which they understood and expressed their understanding of social relations and structures that affected their lives.
Analysis of the interviews fall under the aegis of the “study of narrativity.” Narrativity should not be conflated with the method of presenting historical knowledge or a mode of “representation.” Rather, it should be considered a part of social epistemology and ontology: the employers and servants’ narratives, in and of themselves, were informative of how and why the respondents respectively constituted their identities, or conversely and in distinct ways challenged identities constructed on their behalf.
Put simply, we come to construct our identities by locating ourselves in narratives in which we process our understanding of ourselves and the world around us: “Ontological narratives make identity and the self something that one becomes. Thus narrative embeds identities in time and spatial relationships.” 45 Take, for example, the voice that I develop in this chapter, and ultimately throughout the entire study. It is through what, how, and why I say what I do—in this case, in written form—to my reader, that I come to understand, construct, and project my identity as a scholar. Out in the field, the process is somewhat similar in the sense that employers and domestic workers construct their identities as they narrate to me or others that which they consider important. I share the construction and presentation of parts of this study with the voices of the peoples whose everyday lives help to shape decisionmaking at the national level, and who are affected by transnational forces generally beyond their control.
In January 1994, I traveled back to Malaysia for approximately six months to conduct ethnographic research on the causes and consequences of Malaysian employment of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. The initial stages of fieldwork involved archival research and interviews of policymakers and activists. It is important to emphasize here that there is little secondary literature on domestic service in colonial and postcolonial Malaysia. Yet, the challenge of analyzing the relationship between state-led expansion of export-oriented development and the institution of contemporary domestic service that is currently dominated by the labor of foreign female domestic workers necessitates examining the past.
The processes of reconstructing a picture of domestic service from colonialism to the point in which transnational migrant domestic labor literally has displaced Malaysian female domestic workers involved archival research and analysis of newspaper articles, colonial literature, and scholarship on Malaysian women and development. Unstructured interviews of former Malaysian female domestic workers whom I encountered while in the field contributed to the discussion of how and why Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers have come to work for Malaysian families (see chapter 3).
Interviews of policymakers, representatives from the Philippine and Indonesian embassies, and Malaysian activists were conducted to ascertain the state’s policy on the in-migration of foreign female domestic workers. Malaysian state officials and representatives of the labor-sending states consented to interviews only under the expressed agreement of anonymity. If and when there are citations to such interviews, only the date and/or place of interviews are identified.
I was informed by activists and several state officials in 1994, that the Home Affairs Ministry (arguably, the most powerful ministry and one that is controlled directly by the Prime Minister) had imposed a “gag order” prohibiting official interviews on low wage labor in-migration. According to a state official, given the unending low wage labor demands of key industries, “The state opens one eye and closes the other [to the issue of low wage labor in-migration].” Chapters 2, 3, and 4 offer more detailed analyses of why labor in-migration has become a politically sensitive issue in the country.
Analysis of the causes and consequences of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ in-migration to Malaysia also required investigating Malaysian citizens’ demands for household help, privately owned companies that specialize in supplying foreign domestic labor, and the domestic workers’ perspectives of the in-migration and employment processes. The knowledge generated in the process of field research, and consequently organized, analyzed, and presented—especially in chapters 4, 5, and 6—derive from a combination of observation and unstructured interviews of Malaysian employers, Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers, and private domestic employment agencies (DOMs).
During the period of field research, I lived in various neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur with the intent of observing some of the working conditions and relations between employers and foreign female domestic workers, and possibly the opportunity to interview the employers and their domestic servants. While some employers agreed to speak with me, only in rare cases was I given permission to speak with domestic workers before or after interviews with employers. Even so, employers were always within a comfortable listening distance. In lieu of employers’ consent in these neighborhoods, I interviewed Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers at churches, shopping malls, supermarkets, “pasar malam,” 46 bus/taxi stands, and on rare occasions, domestic employment agency houses. 47
Filipina servants were more accessible than their Indonesian counterparts. A major reason is that the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) negotiated a standardized contract governing salary and working conditions. Among the requirements are four rest days or days off every month. During the period of research, domestic workers were allowed only two rest days a month, at best. On their rest days, most of the women attend Sunday church services, after which they would either go shopping, back to their employers’ houses, or even to “afternoon” discotheques.
The Indonesian state has yet to negotiate for and insist on a standardized contract for their female nationals. Employers are advised by DOMs to pay Indonesian servants approximately RM10–15 (at an approximate exchange rate of RM2.6 to US$1 in 1994) in lieu of one rest day per month to keep the women from leaving their workplace. Public perception and discourse that associate legal and illegal foreign female domestic workers with crimes of theft and prostitution play a major part in employers’ refusal to allow Indonesian servants (who do not have standardized work contracts) to leave their houses unaccompanied, or even to converse with friends at the house-gates.
Some Indonesian domestic workers, to be sure, did not wish to be interviewed for fear that I was an undercover immigration official conceivably interested in their legal or illegal status. Potential Indonesian respondents then, were recommended by a variety of peoples: Indonesian and Malay informants in the informal economy (e.g., hawkers in the Chow Kit area); Filipina servants who identified Indonesian servants in their neighborhoods; Indonesian migrant workers waiting to have papers processed at their embassy; and Indonesian female restaurant workers.
The “ethnographer’s path,” as it evolved was never that of a direct path from points A to Z. 48 Rather, the road that I found myself traveling on was at times rough, bumpy, and bent at a ninety degree angle; and at other times it was smooth and straight. 49 It is not possible to offer a precise sense of the duration of unstructured interviews because there were no clearcut markers that distinguished when an interview proper began or ended—short of my taking physical leave of the respondent. Interviews were conducted while Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers worked (e.g., hanging clothes in the front of the house, buying groceries at the wet market), shopped, ate their meals, or even while they supervised children in neighborhood playgrounds. There were quite a number of times when the interviews could be and were interrupted by friends of foreign domestic workers who either wanted to join the conversation, or who wanted the respondents to leave with them to go elsewhere. For the most part, Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ control over their use of “free” time was severely constrained by their employers. Some women were given one day off a month while others had two rest days or even none at all. Even so, a typical rest day could range from a few hours to a maximum of twelve hours. My intention was to gather information with the least amount of intrusion or interruption in the women’s activities.
In almost every interview, foreign female domestic workers were the first to assume the role of the interviewer. They wanted to know what I did in America, my experience living there, and if I knew anyone (e.g., a “nice” employer) in Kuala Lumpur or America who wanted to hire a domestic worker, and so forth. Once they were comfortable with the fact that I neither worked for the state nor for DOMs, they would ask me what I wanted to know. I then inquired about their lives, e.g., why they chose to work as servants, their views of Malaysian employers, what they considered problems at work, and how they dealt with the problems. These were the general questions I had in mind for the workers. Whether or not the questions were asked in a specific order, or even were needed to be asked, depended on the context of each interview. Approximately eighty-nine interviews of Filipina female domestic workers and forty-seven interviews of Indonesian female domestic workers were conducted over the course of the field research period.
Interviews with employers occurred in their houses, country clubs, restaurants, offices, and on several occasions, brokerage firms—i.e., wherever the respondents could fit interviews into their schedules. I began with my social and professional networks, and over time, the snowball approach produced sixty-eight respondents. Most, upon learning that I studied overseas, “claimed” me as belonging to the middle class. Consequently, narratives were interspersed with “You know-lah . . . ,” “I tell you . . . ,” “[N]o need to say any more, am I right?” and so forth. I read these prefixes and suffixes to the employers’ narratives as their attempt to establish some degree of commonality with me—i.e., as a Malaysian, and as one who was perceived to belong to the same social stratum—that ultimately gave them the license or the justification for sharing their candid views of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers (see especially chapters 5 and 6). Indeed, I would ask a respondent to clarify his/her statements if they were not clear to me. Many times, a respondent either would organize a “get together” with other friends in her house or invite me to a social function as a way to facilitate my research or to “make life easier for you, so that you don’t need to call them one by one.” 50
Although I did not make any efforts to single out male or female employers, the majority of the respondents were female. Husbands of female employers, even when present during the interviews, deferred to their wives in discussing “maids,” and would interject to emphasize or add what they thought were important points in narrating the processes involved in hiring and evaluating the performance of foreign domestic workers.
The names of all employers and foreign servants in this study are pseudonyms because of the respondents’ requests for anonymity. Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers were fearful of negative repercussions from employers, DOMs, and the Immigration Department, while employers did not wish to divulge their identities and their narratives on foreign female domestic workers. The interviews were not tape recorded. Notes were taken either with permission during the interview, or immediately afterward.
There were several occasions when an informant or a respondent would call me the day after a social function for a “debriefing” session, i.e., to convey to me his/her interpretation of fellow conversants’ behavior and/or statements about issues discussed the previous night. In these sessions, I would remember what Simon Ottenberg calls “head notes” or information previously unrecorded in field notes, but that could and would surface when triggered by an event or a conversation. 51 These head notes were included in the field notes.
Several key issues arise from the method of unstructured interviews. Bonnie Dill, in her study of African-American domestic servants, discussed Aaron Cicourel’s identification of the five issues that emerge from conducting interviews in general: “[T]rust; status discrepancies; varying perceptions and interpretations of questions; tension between sensitive areas which may cause a subject to withdraw; and the fact that much that is meaningful to both parties remains unstated.” 52 I dealt with the first four challenges by considering the interviews as interactions in which the interviewer and the respondent worked out issues of trust and honesty. As Clifford Geertz argued, “It is dialogue that does it, however delicate and liable to misfire, not inquisition, however orderly and straight from the shoulder.” 53
In the duration of my field work, employers’ and foreign female domestic workers’ narratives on their respective experiences with regards to domestic service were interspersed with long discussions on matters that seemed, at the outset, barely relevant to the central topic. I nevertheless sat patiently and listened to advice on the latest haute couture, how to choose a good husband, and so forth.
Cicourel’s last challenge, I believe, is central to those who choose to conduct research in their home country, since most of the “social cues” that they consider part of everyday life easily would and could be problematized or made “alien” by researchers from other countries. Consequently throughout the course of my field research, it required a conscious effort on my part as the researcher to engage in what I call a “self-induced ethnomethodological stance”; to be constantly aware that all of what I normally took for granted in everyday Malaysian life might and did generate relevant/pertinent information for this study. 54
DOMs would represent one of the most challenging aspects of fieldwork. I obtained a list of legal DOMs furnished by the Immigration Department, and having been forewarned by NGOs of their uncooperative nature, I nevertheless called a few to request interviews. The requests were denied almost instantaneously. Upon learning that a friend and a close relative were in the process of selecting DOMs to facilitate the process of hiring foreign female domestic workers, we sat down and devised a list of questions for the DOMs such as the fees charged for processing an employer’s application form, and the difference in the cost involved in hiring a Filipina as opposed to an Indonesian domestic worker. In the role as a prospective employer, I “interviewed” via the telephone and/or in person, representatives from twenty DOMs (see especially chapter 4).
Ethnographic research supports my epistemic position which, among other issues previously discussed, “repudiates the idea of a social reality out there independent of the observer.” 55 My identity as a Malaysian woman cannot and is not bracketed or suspended from my identity as a researcher in the course of organizing, analyzing, and presenting the body of material derived from field research.
It is appropriate here to anticipate and address the argument that this study is not “objective” in the sense that the researcher was not value-neutral in conceptualizing and researching the relation between domestic service and development. Indeed, from the perspective of critical theory (whether it is critical theory informed by the sensibilities of the Habermasian, Coxian, feminist, and/or postmodern positions), a key goal of engaging in intellectual inquiry and discourse is to search for the possibilities of change from an existing social order in which discrimination and oppression are based on nationality, race-ethnicity, gender, class, and/or religion. 56
The ultimate objective in this study is to help ascertain potentialities for the transformation of, or emancipation from, the constraints of seemingly natural social relations, institutions, and structures. 57 The question becomes emancipation for whom and for what?
To be sure, the plight of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia can be temporarily solved, at the very least, by the implementation of standardized work contracts, grievance mechanisms, legislation that defines and enforces the rights of domestic workers, and so forth. These various mechanisms, however, do not address present capitalist-patriarchal structures and processes that are constituted by and that constitute a warped conception of the good life as it is currently packaged and promoted throughout the world. The good life today is characteristically consumption-oriented, most visibly at the expense of the working poor and the physical environment. From the perspective of labor-sending states, structural adjustment and stabilization policies that promise the potential for state elites to provide their peoples with the context to pursue and to enjoy the good life increasingly necessitate the “export” of female nationals as foreign domestic workers. At the labor-receiving end, state-encouraged middle-class Malaysian pursuit of the good life via enhanced material consumption also involves consuming the labor or services of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. Most importantly, the processes of consuming migrant domestic labor occur in a context in which foreign female domestic workers are denied labor protection while employer-related abuse, for the most part, remains unpunished.
In the race to realize the good life via more efficient means to accumulate wealth that allow for greater acts of consumption, it is assumed that the most basic values of human decency and respect can and will remain intact. The real danger of failure by officials to address the causes of Malaysian demands for and abuse of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers, together with middle-class employers’ refusal to confront a development path that greatly shapes their lifestyles, is that it may well lead to the emergence of a future generation of middle-class citizens who may be socialized in the art of consumption in a way that disregards or dismisses the negative consequences on those who serve them. The emancipation of foreign female domestic workers from oppressive and dehumanizing working conditions, then, is dependent on the emancipation of middle-class employers and the state elite from the idea that modernity should and can be reduced to, and made synonymous with, enhanced consumption.
At the level of scholarly discourse, emancipation takes on the equally urgent and fundamental restructuring of the ways in which we conceive and execute research problems. The study of social change in this era of the global expansion of neoliberalism may be likened to making decisions to renovate or to raze an old building. As “architects” and “construction” workers then, should we demolish the house and use new tools and material to rebuild? Do we have the means to do so? Or should we renovate the house, recycle the tools and material, and use them in innovative ways to build a different house?
As far as the intellectual project of generating knowledge is concerned, emancipation is related to understanding, acknowledging, and acting to undo received disciplinary and epistemological boundaries that segregate the pursuit of knowledge. I neither argue that any intellectual division of labor is unfruitful, nor the idea that we should critique received traditions for the sake of engaging in critique. Rather, I question how and why we have come to defend constructed boundaries such as the separation of political science from anthropology, and/or literature that have obstructed the pursuit of knowledge. Some of the consequences of this kind of intellectual segregation are the production of unidimensional pictures of social change, and the silencing or marginalization of voices within the academy that struggle to paint a more “human,” thus more complex and less definitive picture of social change.
In the past, the belief that the human mind was passive (it did not interfere with the experience of sensory data) and ahistoric (static through space and time) led us on a grand search for laws—universal laws of social change that were believed to be immutable. In doing so, the intellectual project became one of conceptualizing and acting upon such laws as “truth,” whereas “truth” as we have had to confront it is the inherent placing and valuing of hidden worldviews, values, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes within conceptual frameworks as “natural” and “objective,” thus free from distortion or critique. The epistemic and methodological positions of “objective truth” have been problematic for what and how they obscure value choices. The demise of the tenets of mind as passive and ahistoric, truth as objective and immutable, imply that as social change is grounded in history; so too are the ways in which we conceptualize or problematize issues. As scholars, precisely because we are members of society, we participate in generating, validating, opposing, constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing social phenomena. The pursuit of knowledge cannot and does not exempt us from influencing and obviously being influenced by the changing environment.
The heated verbal and written ideological debates over the control of intellectual territory leaves the task of studying and explaining social change even more difficult as “disciples” or scholars-to-be are caught in the crossfire. It also masks the initial and overriding motive of engaging in the intellectual project. If the stated and unstated intentions are to understand social change and to search for possibilities of reconstructing an alternative social order premised on different grounds, then self-reflexivity is a necessity and not a luxury.
The best feminist analysis, insists that the inquirer her\himself be placed in the same critical plane as the overt subject matter, thereby recovering the entire research process for scrutiny in the results of the research. That is, the class, race, culture, and gender assumptions, beliefs and behaviours of the researcher her\himself must be placed within the frame of the picture that she\he attempts to paint . . . Introducing this ‘subjective’ element in the analysis in fact increases the objectivity of the research and decreases the ‘subjectivism’ which hides this kind of evidence from the public. . . . This requirement [to be up front with one’s assumptions] is no idle attempt to ‘do good’ by the standards of imagined critics in classes, races, cultures (or of a gender) other than that of the researcher. Instead we need to avoid the objectivist stance that attempts to make the researcher’s cultural beliefs and practices invisible while simultaneously skewering the objects, beliefs and practices to the display board. 58
To this end, I have explicitly integrated my nationality, class, and ethnic backgrounds to acknowledge that my schemata for viewing and understanding the world must necessarily be the product of the interactions between two received traditions. They are the class-ethnic-gender socialization processes I experienced as a member of Malaysian society; and the legacy of academic and intellectual training in higher institutions of learning in Europe and North America. The synthesis, and at times, contradictions between these two traditions have driven the formulation and articulation of this study.
In the following chapters, I examine the forces at work on the transnational, national, and household levels in which the Malaysian state elite and the middle classes gradually come to share a similar vision of the good life that involves the in-migration and employment of foreign female domestic workers.
Notes on the Epigraphs
(In order of appearance): Mahathir Mohamad, “Malaysia: The Way Forward,” in Malaysia’s Vision 2020: Understanding the Concept, Implications and Challenges (Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publications, 1991), p. 404; Interview of “Anita” in The Star April 10, 1994; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 246; Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu, trans. by Victor H. Mair (New York: Bantam Books, 1994), pp. 161–162, and p. 277.
Endnotes
Note 1: Throughout this study, the nouns “domestic worker,” “domestic servant,” “servant,” and “household worker” are used interchangeably. The phrases “foreign female domestic workers,” “foreign domestic workers,” “foreign servants,” “Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers,” and “transnational migrant domestic labor/workers” also are used interchangeably. Unless specified otherwise, domestic service refers to the category of live-in domestic service, and not to day-work or part-time work. Back.
Note 2: Three of the most prominent nongovernmental organizations are Tenaganita; The Gender Project Group at the Asian and Pacific Development Centre; and the International Council on Management of Population Programmes. For discussions of employer-related abuse of foreign female domestic workers elsewhere in the world, see Patricia Weinert, Foreign Female Domestic Workers: Help Wanted! Working Paper on International Migration for Employment (Geneva: International Labour Organization, 1991); Asian and Pacific Development Centre [APDC], The Trade in Domestic Helpers: Causes, Mechanisms, and Consequences (Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, 1989); Asian Migrant Forum, Special Issue: Migrant Workers and Trade Unions, no. 6 (1992): 1&-;37; Issues in Gender and Development, Special Issue: International Migration of Women, no. 5 (1993): 1–39; Middle East Watch: Women’s Rights Project, Special Issue: Punishing the Victim: Rape and Mistreatment of Asian Maids in Kuwait, 4, no. 8 (1992): 1–44; and Christian Conference of Asia–Urban Rural Mission [CCA-URM], Asian Labor: Migration from Poverty to Bondage, Report of the Workshop on Labor Migration, Hong Kong August 9–15, 1990. Back.
Note 3: As stated by the Prime Minister in his speech, “Malaysia: the Way Forward,” to the Business Council on February 28, 1991 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. For a full text of the speech, see Ahmad Sarji Abdul Hamid, ed., Malaysia’s Vision 2020: Understanding the Concept, Implications and Challenges (Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publications, 1991), pp. 403–420. Back.
Note 4: The Star April 10, 1994. Back.
Note 5: Quoted in Stephen Gill and James H. Mittelman, “Innovation in International Relations Theory: Coxian Historicism as an Alternative Paradigm,” Paper presented to the Eminent Scholar Panel, 1993 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Acapulco, Mexico, March 1993, p. 4. Back.
Note 6: By definition, the concept of social reproduction embodies paid reproductive labor since the performance of many household tasks may and can be transferred to domestic workers: “[Social reproduction] refer[s] to the array of activities involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally . . includes acts such as purchasing household goods, preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothing, maintaining furniture and appliances.” (Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, 1 [1992], p. 1). Back.
Note 7: Gary Gereffi and Stephanie Fonda, “Regional Paths of Development,” Annual Review of Sociology 18 (1992): 424. For excellent review essays of literature of Asian state-society relations in the midst of industrialization, see Robert Wade, “East Asia’s Economic Success: Conflicting Perspectives, Partial Insights, Shaky Evidence,” World Politics 44, no. 2 (1992): 270–320; and Gary Hawes and Hong Liu, “Exploring the Dynamics of the Southeast Asian Political Economy,” World Politics 45, no. 4 (1993): 629–660.
The perspective of the developmental state is in sharp contrast to two other perspectives on the success of rapid industrialization in Asia: “Magic of the Marketplace” (MM) and the “Confucian Culture”(CC) explanations (see Ruth McVey’s introductory chapter in her edited volume, Southeast Asian Capitalists [Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1992]). As Alice Amsden’s work demonstrates, the facticity of the neoliberal MM perspective is highly questionable (Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989]). The culturalist perspective as predominantly conceptualized is equally dangerous because of the implication that non-Confucian societies will be destined to a fate of poverty and obscurity. For cultural explanations of rapid economic growth in Asia, see Y. S. Leung, “The Uncertain Phoenix: Confucianism and its Modern Fate,” Asian Culture 10 (1987): 85–94; Michio Morishima, Why Has Japan “Succeeded”?: Western Technology and the Japanese Ethos (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Roy Hofheinz and Kent E. Calder, The East Asia Edge (New York: Basic Books, 1982); and Lucian W. Pye, Asian Power and Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985). Back.
Note 8: Kevin Hewison, Richard Robison, and Garry Rodan, “Introduction: Changing Forms of State Power in Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Authoritarianism, Democracy and Capitalist, eds. Kevin Hewison, Richard Robison, and Garry Rodan (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), p. 4. Back.
Note 9: Representative literature on the coercive-repressive Asian state are Amsden, Asia’s Next Giant; Ruth McVey, Southeast Asian Capitalists; Richard Higgott and Richard Robison, eds., Southeast Asia: Essays in the Political Economy of Structural Change (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); Frederic C. Deyo, ed., The Political Economy of the New Asian Industrialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987); and Walden Bello and Stephanie Rosenfeld, “Dragons in Distress: The Crisis of the NICs,” World Policy Journal 7, no. 3 (1990): 431–468. Back.
Note 10: Since the 1970s, Asian labor-sending states continue to encourage female nationals to travel throughout Asia, the Middle East, Western Europe, and North America, to work as foreign female domestic workers. See Asian and Pacific Development Centre, The Trade in Domestic Helpers; and Weinert, Help Wanted!. Back.
Note 11: For the transition from male to female servants in North America and Europe, see Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), chapter 1; and Theresa McBride, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernization of Household Service in England and France 1820–1920 (London: Holmes and Meier, 1976). For analyses of the gender-class-racial dimension of domestic service in North America, see Susan Tucker, Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Mary Romero, M.A.I.D. in the USA (New York: Routledge, 1992); Rollins, Between Women; Bonnie Thornton Dill, Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An Exploration of Work and Family Among Black Female Domestic Servants (New York: Garland, 1994); Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); and David M. Katzman, Seven Days A Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). For analysis of the gender-class-racial dimension of domestic service in the non-Western world, see Jacklyn Cock, Maids and Madams: A Study in the Politics of Exploitation (Johannesburg: Ravan Press), 1980.
Two major studies stand out in their authors’ attempts to link transformations in domestic service to changing immigration patterns, hence national and international politics. See especially Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, and War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese-American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); and Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Back.
Note 12: For discussion on the relationship between domestic service and rural female out-migrants, see Elizabeth Jelin, “Migration and Labor Force Participation of Latin American Women: Domestic Service in the Cities,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3, no. 1 (177): 129–141; Roger Sanjek and Shellee Colen, eds., At Work in Homes: Household Workers in World Perspectives (Washington D.C.: American Anthropological Association, 1990); Ximena Bunster and Elsa M. Chaney, Sellers and Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru (New York: Praeger, 1985); M. Palabrico-Costello, “Female Domestic Servants in Cagayan de Oro, Philippines: Social and Economic Implications of Employment in a Pre-Modern Occupation, in Women in the Urban and Industrial Workforce: Southeast and East Asia, ed. Gavin W. Jones, Monograph no. 33 (Canberra: Development Studies Centre, The Australian National University, 1984); and, Elsa M. Chaney, Mary Garcia Castro, and Margo L. Smith, eds., Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). Chaney, Garcia Castro, and Smith agreed that analyses of the role of the state are necessary for a better understanding of the changing form and content of domestic service. In the introduction to their edited volume, the authors called for studies of the state’s relation to domestic service. Back.
Note 13: On the private-personal point, see Mary Romero’s interesting discussion of her academic colleague’s relation to his domestic worker in M.A.I.D. in the USA, chapter 1. Sedef Arat-Koc argues that overall feminist aversion to the study of domestic service in the West is due to personal discomfort, especially that of white employer-servant of color relations (“In the Privacy of Our Own Homes: Foreign Domestic Workers as a Solution to the Crisis in the Domestic Sphere in Canada,” Studies in Political Economy 28 [1989]: 33–58). Back.
Note 14: Overall, theories of international migration are not able to fully account for the causes and consequences of the transnationalization of migrant female domestic labor. The dominant “push-pull” or equilibrium perspective would have us believe that peoples are “pushed” out of their home countries and “pulled” into host countries primarily because of wage differentials. At the individual or aggregate levels, this neoliberal perspective on migration fails to account for the role of states and key nonstate actors in constructing and sustaining the demand and supply of foreign female domestic workers. Historical-structural approaches, on the other hand, address some of these flaws by focusing on the constraints of social structures. At the global level, the world systems approach posits that the expansion of global capitalist markets inevitably causes migratory flows within states, and also international migration from periphery to core states. South-South migration that has no historical antecedent is explained in terms of the rise of global cities. Yet, there is no adequate explanation of the increasingly gendered nature of transnational labor migration. Even the dual labor market approach, which explains transnational labor migration as the result of specific demands emanating from the host country, cannot fully account for the transnationalization of migrant female domestic labor. Feminist scholars critique the dual labor market approach for privileging analyses of the relationship between transnational male migrant labor and the industrial sector. Primacy placed on the relationship between low wage male migrant labor, economic growth, and a particular mode of production, to a certain extent has obscured the need to conceptualize the interrelationship among gender, transnational labor migration, and the service sector. For an extensive review of migration theories, see Donald J. Massey et al., “Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal,” Population and Development Review 19, no. 3 (1993): 431–466. For a feminist critique of the dual labor market perspective, see Jane Jenson, Elisabeth Hagen, and Ceallaigh Reddy, eds., Feminization of the Labor Force: Paradoxes and Promises (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). I offer a more extensive discussion of the transnationalization of migrant female domestic labor in chapter 4. Back.
Note 15: “Private patriarchy is characterized by the domination of patriarchal relations in the household. Public patriarchy is dominated by employment and the state. In private patriarchy the mode of expropriation of the woman is individual, by the woman’s husband or father. In public patriarchy it is collective, by many men acting in common.” Sylvia Walby, “Woman and Nation,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 33, nos. 1–2: 89. Back.
Note 16: Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases ; and J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Back.
Note 17: Shellee Colen, “Housekeeping for the Green Card: West Indian Household Workers, the State and Stratified Reproduction in New York,” in At Work in Homes, eds. Sanjek and Colen, p. 110. See also Arat-Koc, “In the Privacy of Our Homes”; Frances Henry, “The West Indian Domestic Scheme in Canada,” Social and Economic Studies 17, no. 1 (1968): 83–91; Virginia Dominguez, From Neighbor to Stranger: The Dilemma of Caribbean Peoples in the United States (New Haven: Yale University, Antilles Research Program, 1975); Saskia Sassen-Koob, “Notes on the Incorporation of Third World Women into Wage Labor Through Immigration and Off-Shore Production,” International Migration Review 18, no. 4 (1984): 1144–1167; and Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva K. Stasiulis, “Making the Match: Domestic Placement Agencies and the Racialization of Women’s Household Work,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (1995): 303–335. A number of these studies deal with immigration rules: employing families act as sponsors for Caribbean and/or Asian women who wish to apply for permanent residency, or who are looking for temporary higher wage work in North America. Migrant women are obligated legally to work as live-in servants for the employers. In this sense, the state helps to ensure a constant supply of domestic workers who will stay with their employing families–especially throughout the duration of permanent residency applications. Back.
Note 18: Arat-Koc, “In the Privacy of Our Own Homes,” p. 52. Back.
Note 19: See especially Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases, chapter 8. Back.
Note 20: Joseph A. Camilleri, Anthony P. Jervis, and Albert J. Paolini, eds., The State in Transition: Reimagining Political Space (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1995); Robert W. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Stephen Gill, “Theorizing the Interregnum: The Double Movement and Global Politics in the 1990s,” in International Political Economy: Understanding Global Disorder ed. Björn Hettne (London: Zed Books, 1995); and James H. Mittelman, “Rethinking the International Division of Labour in the Context of Globalisation,” Third World Quarterly 16, no. 2 (1995): 273–294. Back.
Note 21: Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, edited with an Introduction by L. J. LaFleur (New York: Hafner Press, 1948), p. 19. Back.
Note 22: For excellent critiques of the epistemological foundations in key studies on Southeast Asian development, see P. W. Preston, Rethinking Development: Essays on Development and Southeast Asia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), and Discourses of Development: State, Market, and Polity in the Analysis of Complex Change (Hants, England: Avebury, 1994). Back.
Note 23: “By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good or happiness (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose intent is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual.” Bentham, Morals and Legislation, p. 2. Back.
Note 24: The World Bank’s rationale and prescription for the expansion of export-oriented development in Asia, can be found in its publication, The East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy: Summary (Washington D.C.: World Bank, 1994). For a concise description and critical analysis of structural adjustment and stabilization policies in Africa, see Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice, Recolonization or Liberation: The Bonds of Structural Adjustment and Struggles for Emancipation (Toronto: Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice, 1990). Back.
Note 25: According to Antonio Gramsci, the state’s hegemonic ideology that inheres in state agencies, institutions, legislation, and policies, binds social forces into a cohesive “historic bloc.” The Gramscian phrase, “counterhegemonic historic bloc” is the collective term for various forms of opposition to the theory and practice of neoliberalism within a country. The Coxian phrase “transnational counterhegemonic historic bloc” is the collective term for opposition on the transnational level (see Cox, Production, Power and World Order, chapter 10 “The Formation of Classes and Historic Blocs,”). For various examples of national and transnational oppositional forces, see Bice Maiguscha, “The Role of Ideas in a Changing World Order: The Case of the International Indigenous Peoples Movement, 1975–1991,” Paper presented at the International Conference on Changing World Order and the United Nations System, Yokohama, Japan, March 24–27, 1992; James R. Rush, The Last Tree: Reclaiming the Environment in Tropical Asia (New York: Asia Society, 1991); and Dana Allston, ed., We Speak for Ourselves: Social Justice, Race and Environmentalism (Washington D.C.: Panos Institute, 1990). Back.
Note 26: Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 246. Back.
Note 27: Barrington Moore Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966); Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), and “Will More Countries Be Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 2 (1984): 193–218. Back.
Note 28: For a good detailed summary of debates between class theorists, see especially Scott McNall, Rhonda Levine, and Rick Fantasia, Bring Class Back In: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (Boulder: Westview, 1991). For studies of the middle classes in the developing and/or rapidly industrializing worlds, see Dale L. Johnson, ed., Middle Classes in Dependent Countries (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1985); Richard Tanter and Kenneth Young, eds., The Politics of Middle Class Indonesia, Monash Papers on Southeast Asia no. 19 (Clayton, Australia: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990); and Richard Robison and David S. G. Goodman, eds., The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, McDonalds and Middle Class Revolution (London: Routledge, 1996). Back.
Note 29: Helen Arshat, Tan Boon Ann, Tay Nai Ping, and M. Subbiah, Marriage and Family Formation in Peninsular Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: National Population and Family Development Board, 1989), p. 160. Back.
Note 30: Robert W. Cox, in his path-breaking volume Production, Power and World Order argued that the expansion of neoliberalism affects and is affected by the interplay between changing state-society relations and social relations of production. While this is a theoretically valid point that is supported by empirical evidence, in our preoccupation with social relations of production we have overlooked the other equally important side of the coin, i.e., changes in consumption patterns and the ensuing political, economic, and social consequences. In other words, people do not wake up on a given day and practice capitalist social relations and lifestyle, but that they are socialized to pursue these relations and lifestyle. Changes in consumption patterns have interesting and compelling ramifications for the politics of governance in various regions of the world (see Catherine Jones, “Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan: Oikonomic Welfare States,” Government and Opposition 25, no. 4 (1990): 446–462; Janet W. Salaff, State and Family in Singapore: Restructuring a Developing Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Diane Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Back.
Note 31: Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14, no. 6 (1985): 730. Back.
Note 32: Many scholars of the family use the sociobiological dimension to draw the distinction between the family and the household: a family is a kin-related network whose members may or may not reside in the same physical locale, whereas a household consists of kin and/or nonkin members who reside in the location. See Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions (New York: Longman, 1982); William J. Goode, The Family (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964); and D. H. J. Morgan, The Family, Politics and Social Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). Back.
Note 33: Jacques Donzelot, Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979). Back.
Note 34: Morgan, The Family, pp. 72–73. Christopher Lasch argues that no families are impervious to the welfare state penetration and control (Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged [New York: Basic Books, 1977]), whereas Donzelot drew a distinction between the state’s “policing” of working and middle class families (Policing of Families).
See also Freidrich Engels’s classic text on capitalist development and changes in household relations (The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State: In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan by Frederick Engels, with an Introduction and Notes by Eleanor Burke Leacock [New York: International Publishers, 1972]). Engels examined the interrelationships among the development of private property, the shift in production beyond the household, and concomitant changes in gender relations. Back.
Note 35: Donzelot, Policing of Families, p. 49. Back.
Note 36: Christopher Blaydon and Carol Stack, “Income Support Policies and the Family,” in The Family, eds. Alice Rossi, Jerome Kagan, and Tamara Hareven (New York: Norton, 1978). Back.
Note 37: Gramsci discussed the state’s educative role in the following way: “Government with the consent of the governed—but with this consent organized, and not generic and vague as it is expressed in the intent of elections. The State does have and request consent, but it also ‘educates’ this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations” (Prison Notebooks, p. 259). Although Gramsci did not specifically address the state’s relation to the family, his concept of the “ethical” state which interpenetrates political and civil society, and which uses legislation to facilitate the construction of a higher level of civilization, creates the theoretical opening or space for scholars to further theorize the state’s relation to the family (see Prison Notebooks, chapter 2. Back.
Note 38: The phrase “redraft morality” is borrowed from M. Jacqui Alexander, “Redrafting Morality: the Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offenses Bill of Trinidad and Tobago,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Anne Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Back.
Note 39: Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966). Back.
Note 40: In this sense, there is similarity between postmodern and critical theorists. While postmodern theorists frequently cite Jacques Derrida in discussions of the method of deconstruction (especially in deconstructing dyadic relations/constructs that inherently privilege one side over the other), critical theory (whether it is of the Coxian or Habermasian perspective) also is premised on the processes of taking apart social institutions and structures which have been constructed in particularly skewed ways that legitimize the oppression or subjugation of certain groups of peoples (see Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978; and Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro [Boston: Beacon Press, 1971]). For a discussion of the various strands of postmodern thought, see Pauline Marie Rosenau, “Once Again Into the Fray: International Relations Confronts the Humanities,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 19, no. 1 (1990): 83–110, and Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads and Intrusions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Back.
Note 41: Robert W. Cox, “Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory,” in Neorealism and Its Critics, ed. Robert O. Keohane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 208–9. Back.
Note 42: James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Back.
Note 43: Sidney Verba, Joseph DiNunzio, and Christine Spaulding, “Unwanted Attention: Report on a Sexual Harassment Survey,” Report to the Faculty Council of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, September 1983, as quoted in Shulamith Reinharz, Feminist Methods in Social Research (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 90. Back.
Note 44: Roger Sanjek, “On Ethnographic Validity,” in Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). As the reader can discern readily, I have adhered to the first two guidelines in this introductory chapter. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 offer extensive fieldnote quotations. Back.
Note 45: argaret R. Somers, “The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach,” Theory and Society 23, no. 5 (1994): 618. Back.
Note 46: These are open-air night markets replete with hawker stalls that are set up in various neighborhoods. The hawker stalls are the Malaysian version of fast food since those who are tired after work and/or do not feel like cooking at home can walk just a few blocks beyond their houses, sit down at one of the tables set up by the food vendors, and have dinner served within minutes. Back.
Note 47: Some DOMs set aside residential houses for Filipina servants to go to on their rest days—as opposed to running the risk of exposing servants to negative or criminal influences in public space. To date, I am not aware of any agency residential houses for Indonesian maids. Back.
Note 48: Roger Sanjek, “Fieldnotes and Others,” in Fieldnotes, ed. Sanjek, p. 398. Back.
Note 49: I would converse also with taxi drivers, when they drove me to houses with Indonesian servants, and wait while I interviewed the domestic workers. One time, a taxi driver drove me to the place where his Indonesian girlfriend worked. We quickly discovered that her employers were still in the house, so we waited around the corner for what seemed an eternity, before I heard a whistle. He drove around the corner and found his girlfriend standing at the gate with a smile on her face—her employers had just left the house. Back.
Note 50: Bonnie Thorton Dill wrote of a similar experience: “[T]hey [domestic servants] were primarily interested in helping me; and if this would help me get my degree, whatever it was, they were glad to do it” (Across the Boundaries, p. 3). The qualitative difference is that middle-class respondents in my study tried to talk me out of writing about “maids.” Many of them believed that it was more interesting for me to research “[high] politics.” One even mentioned that a study of gender relations at the various new restaurant-bars in Kuala Lumpur would have been a more fruitful use of my time. Back.
Note 51: Simon Ottenberg, “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text,” in Fieldnotes, ed. Sanjek, p. 146. Back.
Note 52: Dill, Across the Boundaries, p. 34. Back.
Note 53: Clifford Geertz, Foreword, to Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth Century Notable, Dale F. Eickelman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. xi. Back.
Note 54: For example, the act of swimming at a country/sporting club would have been part of my everyday, or to be more precise, my every other week experience. Yet, the kind of car window sticker provided by the club became a “symbol” of my middle-class status that effectively coopted me—in the eyes of the middle-class respondents—as a member of an “imagined community of middle classes.” Thus, I was privy to selected kinds of information that a foreign or a local researcher who did not belong to that class, would have had perhaps a longer and more difficult time in eliciting from the respondents. The question then, is “How was I able to successfully interview foreign female domestic workers?” Here, I draw on Carol Smart’s notion of “interviewing up” and “interviewing down” (“Researching Prostitutes: Some Problems for Feminist Researchers,” in A Feminist Ethic for Social Science Research [Laviston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988], pp. 37–46). In my conversations with Filipina and Indonesian servants, I addressed them as my equal, in terms of my nonverbal and verbal gestures. In other words, I did not relate to them as if they belonged to a lower social stratum. A number of foreign female domestic workers validated my attitude and behavior with statements such as “You are not like the rest,” “You respect us,” or “I like you because you do not think we are all prostitutes.” Back.
Note 55: Reinharz, Feminist Methods, p. 46. Back.
Note 56: Cox, “Social Forces”; Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests; Ben Agger, Gender, Culture and Power: Toward A Feminist Postmodern Critical Theory (Westport: Praeger, 1993); and Sandra Harding, ed., Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 57: The postmodern strand that practices and validates the method of deconstructing social institutions, dyads, and so forth, I would argue, is a version of critical theory (even though some postmodernists reject the notion of theory) since postmodern scholars are driven to “address the hierarchy of value over the allegedly valueless” (Agger, Gender, Culture, Power, p. 96). Taken to one of the logical conclusions, some postmodernists can and do adopt a relativist stance. Nevertheless, as Sandra Harding eloquently wrote, “The articulation of relativism as an intellectual process emerges historically only as an attempt to dissolve challenges to the legitimacy of purportedly universal beliefs and ways of life. Multirelativism is an objective problem or a solution to a problem only from the perspective of the dominating groups. For groups that are subjugated and marginalized, a relativist stance expresses a false consciousness because it accepts the dominating group’s insistence on their right to hold distorted views as intellectually legitimate” (“Introduction: Is There A Feminist Method?” in Feminism and Methodology, ed. Harding, p. 10). Back.
Note 58: Harding, “Is There a Feminist Method?,” p. 9. Back.
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