Negotiating the (im)mobility of domestic work: Communicative erasures, disrupted embodiments, and neoliberal Asia

ABSTRACT

Multiple communicative erasures are embedded in the labor practices of migrant domestic work. The parallel experiences of South Asian workers laboring in Noida (India) and Singapore as experiences of (im)mobilities and expulsions are discussed amid the construction and importation of the “The Singapore Model” across Asian cities. We specifically hear the voices of workers in Noida as scripts of the global margins that exist within neoliberal meccas. These storied realities of performing reproductive labor disrupt the celebration of neoliberal development in model cities for work and play. Domestic work continues to function in precarity with multiple layers of structural (im)mobilities.

KEYWORDS:

• (im)mobilities
• precarity
• migrant domestic labor
• neoliberal governmentality
• culture-centered

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National University of Singapore: [Grant Number NUS ARF Grant number: R-124-000-048-133].