Agency, precarity and recognition: reframing South East Asian female migrant workers on screen

ABSTRACT

Female migrant workers (FMWs) across media and cultural spheres, humanitarian forums and academia are often represented as passive and parochial ‘Third World’ victims with little to no agency over their lives and bodies. In cinema, migrant agency persists in being circumscribed within hegemonic scripts of gender-specific moralities and the neoliberal ethic of individual capability and economic value. Hierarchies and biases are resultantly constructed among these underprivileged, racialized female subjects, as affirmative recognition is conferred to those considered deserving of commiseration and those who do not. This paper surveys a range of films that have emerged from South East Asia alongside current debates on the feminization of labour migration, and traces the shifting representations of agency among precarious migrant women to examine the complex relation between agency and recognition. It draws on Joel Fendelman and Patrick Daly’s Remittance (2015) and Midi Z's The Road to Mandalay (2016) and their appraisal of migrant agency to examine alternative potentialities for agency to be recognized and reimagined in various contexts of patriarchal dominance, racial inequality and capital control beyond formulaic representation.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• labour migration
• South East Asia
• cinema
• neoliberal globalization
• recognition

Questions of agency are often foregrounded in debates about underprivileged migrant women vulnerable to forced labour, trafficking and modern-day slavery. Defined as ‘the ability and capacity to act or exert power’ (‘agency’, n.),¹ agency may relate to one's ‘capability sets’ to function for survival, fulfil desires and achieve well-being and freedom, Amartya Sen reasons (1985, 200–201); but Sen's sharpening of the term has been dismissed for glossing over the social and material conditions that constrain and influence capability (Briones 2009, 113). Delinking agency from broader structures of power risks discursive violence against these women. To date, documentaries on slavery and proposals published by non-governmental organizations to combat violence against female migrant workers (FMWs) continue to refer to them as submissive subjects and powerless victims with little to no agency over their lives and bodies.² Oftentimes too, conversations about their struggles and subjectivities remain circumscribed within Eurocentric scripts, gender-specific moralities and the neoliberal enterprise that celebrates individual capability and hyper-productivity. The project of re-examining migrant epistemologies and feminist writings on racialized and underclass migrant women demands that conceptions of agency and the shifting cultural sites within which they are embedded must also be revisited. The creative field of cinema offers a productive arena often sidelined in migration studies to unpack the complex relation between agency and recognition in wider society. This paper sets out to position dominant representations of migrant agency and respective cinematic interventions alongside current debates on the feminization of labour migration with the following questions: how are migrant agencies constituted within frames of recognition, and how are they finding renewed expression within various contexts of patriarchal dominance, racial inequality and capital control beyond formulaic representation?

To answer these questions, I turn to Joel Fendelman and Patrick Daly's Remittance (2015) and Midi Z's The Road to Mandalay (2016), two films that offer fertile ground to plough up prevailing meanings of agency and victimization. In league with recent productions on migrant workers from the region,³ Remittance and Mandalay are methodically engaged with the political-economic underpinnings of transnational labour arbitrage, as they follow the gruelling struggles of a precarious FMW from the Philippines and another from Shan State, Myanmar, living and toiling in undignified low-waged labour sectors in Singapore and Thailand. Their tone and social logic also mark an iconoclastic departure from the Singaporean and Thai horror box office successes, Kelvin Tong's The Maid (2005) and Sopon Sukdapisit's Ladda Land (2011). Although visceral scenes of gore and violence in the latter two films underscored the unimaginable atrocities perpetrated against powerless FMWs, their abjection persisted in being insignificant and unrelatable (Gomes 2011, 145; Ancuta 2014, 239). The wretched ghost victims in Maid and Ladda personify a ‘bare life’ distinctiveness – a term coined by Giorgio Agamben (1998) and frequently adopted by migration scholars (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007; Kitiarsa 2014) to characterize the plight of migrants denuded of juridico-political life and also of identity. The horror formulation, however, was soon replaced with realist genre conventions inflected with themes more heartening and human: figures of the goodly, diligent worker determined to carve out better lives made their appearance in poignant dramas such as Lola Amaria's Sunday Morning in Victoria Park (2010), Sopawan Boonnimitra and Peerachai Kerdsint's The Isthmus (2013) and Anthony Chen's Ilo Ilo (2013), the first Singaporean film to win the Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 2013. Ilo Ilo's favourable reception attests to growing impulses for sympathy and recognition toward these marginalized workers for sustaining the city-state's economy.

Scholars (Ho 2015; Erni 2017; Piocos 2019) are recently beginning to examine ways in which liberal notions of inclusion and belonging are circulated through ascriptions of morality and emotionality onto migrant subjects, as is the case in Ilo Ilo. Affective instruction, according to them, reifies hierarchies among those considered deserving of commiseration and those who do not. Little, however, remains said about depictions of agency within similar registers of recognition. The struggle for recognition among the dispossessed has become a catalyst for rights movements across the world, but forms of recognition conferred onto marginalized communities in liberal polity, Glen Coulthard argues, remain ‘profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal’ (2014, 25). Efforts to account for migrant agencies end up being implemented through affirmative action and difference accommodation, devoid of the self-affirmative logic that Frantz Fanon (2008) contends in Black Skin, White Masks is critical to anticolonial empowerment. The genre shift in the films mentioned above elicits these neo-colonial nuances clearly: though pitiful, the tragically hapless FMWs bereft of agency in Maid and Ladda remain invisible and may only await rescue; while Terry, the capable worker in Ilo Ilo, is afforded empathetic treatment. Terry is nevertheless empowered only insofar as she defends herself without disrupting the racial and gender hierarchies in Singapore. Agency here is re-scripted along a neoliberal valorization of individual capability that leaves wider fields of power unplumbed. Recognition is largely cultivated through encoded narrative conventions and ossified figurations of FMWs across dominant media and cultural spheres. It is apparent from these films that moral responsibility and economic worth are attributes that FMWs must embody, without which they are deemed unworthy of empathy and solicitude.

My paper aims to consider the films’ discursive currency and their tacit implications on FMWs and the cultural politics of recognition in the ever-shifting contexts of migrant-dependent economies in South East Asia and beyond. Just as qualitative and quantitative indicators have been used to measure women's unequal social status in advocacy campaigns (Moghadam and Senftova 2005, 390), cinematic frames facilitate encounters and attitudes, and reorient understandings of their precarious realities. Remittance follows a Filipino mother, Marie, who, burdened by familial obligations, sets off for neighbouring wealthy Singapore to work as a stay-in domestic helper for an expatriate family. During her time in Singapore, her adulterous spouse, Edwardo, squanders away her remittances, leaving their children without money for their daily sustenance and tuition fees. Compelled to make ends meet, Marie takes up additional jobs during her days off without her employers knowing, where she finds happiness in a budding romance and friendships with fellow migrant workers. Eventually, she learns to empower herself and confront her husband's authority when she returns home to Davao City. Mandalay similarly features a young Burmese migrant, Lianqing, whose ambitions and dreams of social mobility draw her to Thailand, where she works as a dishwasher, a factory worker and a salesgirl. Her ambitions of working in Bangkok's gleaming metropolis, however, are hampered time and again by her fellow migrant and male companion, Guo, who hopes to return to Myanmar and start a family with her. Guo finally stabs her in her sleep when she defies his wishes in her pursuit of documentation and independence in Thailand. Guided by and attentive to the shifting contexts within which FMWs in South East Asia are cinematized, this paper begins by offering an overview of transnational labour migration in South East Asia. Following from that, I delve deeper into hegemonic articulations of agency and victimization, particularly those of ‘Third World’ passivity and representations of nationalistic moral agency before exploring competing ideations of agency and precarity emerging from both labour-sending and labour-receiving countries. Finally, I proceed with a close reading of Remittance and Mandalay before concluding this paper. Beyond their interventionist posture, Remittance and Mandalay offer possibilities of reimagining the fluidity of migrant agencies, constraints, desires, motivations, and their relational dynamics with capital, gender, racial and moral-religious domination in our global capitalist conjuncture.

Transnational labour migration in South East Asia

Conceptions of agency and their accompanying significance within economic, familial, moral and sexual domains are central to the politically contested field of women's empowerment and liberation, even as they remain beset with tension and contradiction. Friedrich Engels proclaimed in the advent of the modern era that the emancipation of women entailed the ‘re-introduction of the entire female sex into the public industry’ (1893, 61). Women were believed to hold more agencies and autonomy from the confines of domestic enslavement if they also partook in public work sectors dominated by men. But Engels clearly failed to anticipate the persistence of labour division along gendered and racial lines; as women from advanced economies progressively experienced social and economic mobility, domestic, reproductive, sexual and affective forms of labour – labour they no longer partake in – could now be easily outsourced to those from poorer regions at a cheap cost. The duties traditionally consigned to the mothers and wives of households that FMWs now undertake continue to be regarded as lowly and undignified work. More often than not, they find themselves working in precarious sectors in host countries as live-in maids, caregivers, cleaners, sex workers, entertainers, factory workers among many others, where they are treated as cheap and disposable labour, and coerced into low-paid and exploitative employment. In host countries, they are also often treated as second-class citizens and discriminated against.

Across South East Asia, growing numbers of underprivileged women from poorer regions in Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar are responding to the demand to fill feminized sectors in neighbouring wealthier economies like Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. The International Labour Organization (ILO) reported that between 1990 and 2013, internal migration within the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) increased from 1.5 to 6.5 million (cited in Tuccio 2017, 144), out of which 47.8% were women (ILO 2015, 1). Although transnational labour migration in the region is not particular to these recent years, the region's migratory geography is a corollary of market liberalization, specifically that of labour markets (Kaur 2010a, 387). Following the period of decolonization in the 1970s, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand became major migration and economic corridors, having embraced neoliberal policies of free trade and economic deregulation. Their economies burgeoned further with regional trade monopoly after the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis (Kaur 2010b, 7). To cope with rising competition and productivity demands, these countries became increasingly dependent on cheap and temporary labour supply; while less developed nations recovering from the wake of colonial conflict, economic stagnation under Communist and Socialist authoritarianism, military regimes and global financial crises, began relying heavily on remittance economies generated through their labour supply (6–7). Apart from irregular migration channels, regularized forms of employment such as guest-worker programmes and temporary contracts began expanding across this progressively uneven terrain of development. Countries like the Philippines and Indonesia also saw the opportunity for foreign revenue by encouraging female migration through the formalization of labour brokerage systems, despite the nominal protection and welfare guaranteed to these workers (Yamanaka and Piper 2005, 2).

Rapid changes to transnational labour arbitrage also engendered keen anthropological interest in precarious migrant worker as a social category and the varied determinants that influence their desires, experiences and struggles. Proponents of functionalist theories (Jones 1998; Tsai and Tsay 2004; Tuccio 2017) attribute behavioural patterns of migration primarily to the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ of market forces. Such oversimplifications of economic causality hollow out the prevalence of coercive dynamics and asymmetrical power relations between precarious migrant workers and their recruiters and employers. By contrast, neo-Marxist approaches in migration studies place considerable emphases on the endemic features of power and profit extraction. Persistent inequalities and the exploitative nature of labour migration regimes, according to them (Parreñas 2008; Mavroudi and Nagel 2016; Yeoh 2016), are symptomatic of our global political-economic restructuring, coupled with the retreat of support and welfare provided towards domestic, reproductive and affective forms of labour in contemporary times. Nevertheless, as Hein de Haas cogently points out, the main drawback of neo-Marxist theories, like functionalist ones, is that its ‘deterministic, top-down nature leaves little room for human agency’ (2014, 11). Underprivileged migrant workers in the latter are presumed to be voluntary agents who simply respond to the ebb and flow of market forces; while those in the former are regarded as tragic victims of false consciousness under neoliberalism's ordains, incapable of rising above their oppressive dictates (Ford and Piper 2009, 63–64).

Reframing Third World agency

Unlike their privileged counterparts, feminist engagements and histories from the Global South have featured less prominently across mainstream media, humanitarian forums and academia. Uncritical use of the term, ‘Third World Women’, homogenises these women as subordinate, passive and fatalistic (Mohanty 1991, 64). Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild’s (2003) well-intentioned objective to shed light on FMWs’ disposability and ‘make the invisible visible’ in Global Woman is a clear example that elides mention of personal and political agency.⁴ This writing off not only forecloses imaginaries for migrant action and resistance, it presents an implicit avowal of salvation as the only solution for their misery. Following James C. Scott’s (1985) influential polemic against narratives of Third World meekness in Weapons of the Weak, scholars (Ford and Piper 2009; Ong 2010) have since mounted sustained critiques against these essentialist descriptions by eliciting that migrant women are equally capable of prosaic acts of defiance and organized disobedience to alleviate their harsh working conditions. At issue is not their lack of agency; but that their capacities to act and resist – whether political or decidedly otherwise – often manifest extraneously of constitutional jurisdiction and are set against Western yardsticks of subversion in regions that are neither common nor feasible (Lee 2010, 68; Walters 2013, 188). As Engin Isin and Kim Rygiel assert, the struggle for ‘the inalienable rights of the abject’, continues to be predicated on the logic that ‘the abject is already other than a political subject’ (2007, 190). Ironically, it appears that these very docile and supinely traits are also necessary in mobilizing empathetic concern.

Endeavours to eschew victim narratives on the other hand have wound up overlooking the crucial role of structural inequality that underpins transnational labour migration. Nicole Constable's attempt at ferreting out quotidian instances of self-assertion and complaisance to extol their make-do attitudes in Maid to Order in Hong Kong (2007), for example, has been criticized for obscuring the larger instrumentalities of ideology, capital domination and neo-colonial power that account for their struggles and ‘poorly paid employment and under substandard conditions’ (cited in San Juan 2009, 115–116). These strident denouncements of ‘victim’ labels in favour of neoliberal ideations of agency and individual capability are, as Rebecca Stringer confirms, ‘noticeably victim-blaming’ and ‘profoundly de-politicizing’ (2014, 3). Often, there is also no mention of how demonstrations of agency are construed as public threats in these agency-affirming discourses. Dichotomous interpellations of migrant agency – articulated either as lack or abundance – affix FMW subjects uniformly, even as their actions, desires, motivations and constraints are far from fixed.

The above literature of precarious migrants is by no means exhaustive, but it is clear that recognition of individuals and communities struggling to defend their cultural identities, social interests and economic claims remains contingent on representations of migrant women. It is at this juncture that I also wish to highlight the entanglements between these discursive mappings of migrant lives and what Judith Butler describes as recognizability. For Butler, recognizability characterizes the sets of norms, conditions and meanings that ‘prepare or shape a subject for recognition’ (2009, 5–6). These frames of recognizability, as Butler rightly affirms, are not ‘deterministic’; they ‘emerge and fade depending on broader operations of power’ (4). In the next section, I examine cinema's imbrication within dominant moral schemas in various South East Asian contexts. This sets an overture for the contesting fields of recognition that I intend to explore in the subsequent sections.

Dutiful heroes and neoliberal agents

Morality projects deployed alongside philosophical and religious efforts as part of the post-colonial nation-building process in South East Asia continue to play important roles in constructing ideations of citizenship and migrant identities inscribed with familial and ethnic relations, as well as gender and sexuality norms (Ong 2006, 198; Platt, Davies, and Bennete 2018, 1–2). Promulgated in large part by government-led media campaigns, morality scripts hold considerable sway over these ‘agents of development’, even in Singapore and Thailand where they are frequently considered second-class citizens and foreign aliens (Platt 2018, 90; Piocos 2019). Representations of agency in cinema emerging from the region are often produced within these fields of recognizability and re-scripted along didactic vernaculars across cultural discourses: the reliable remitter, the obedient moral agent, and the diligent and assertive worker are recognized as individuals, capable of national and moral duty and thus worthy of commiseration and commendation. But recognition mediated through these embodied figures of morality simultaneously serves to regulate and discipline.

Especially familiar are the poignant stories of Overseas Filipino Workers’ (OFW) – altruistic mothers and daughters deserving of sympathy and praise for their national sacrifice and economic contribution. This particular endorsement of OFWs can be traced back to President Cory Aquino's first reference to them as ‘bagong bayani’ (‘new heroes’), and later on in the films, Joel Lamangan's The Flor Contemplacion Story (1995) and Tikoy Aguiluz's Bagong Bayani (‘Unsung Heroine’) (1995) (Guevarra 2006, 536; McKay 2015, 119). Both films are based on the tragic real-life events following a Filipino maid by the name of Flor Contemplacion who was hanged in Singapore for allegedly murdering another migrant domestic worker and a local boy despite insufficient evidence to confirm the indictment. Instead of pressing for justice, the films opt for sentimental closures that pay homage to her heroic patriotism; as a result, Flor was not only exalted as a martyr on screen, she even received a burial of a saint in real life (McKay 2012, 58). Such venerations of the OFW moral agent across media platforms not only divert attention away from the government's failure to safeguard their dignity and lives overseas, they fuel the state's neoliberal strategy at the expense of poor, disposable lives (San Juan 2009, 109; Tigno 2012, 26). The films about Flor are not unlike Thai classics that feature internal migrants, such as Chatrichalerm Yukol's Hotel Angel (1974) and Paul Spurrier's P (2005). These didactic tales are centred around the guileless, rural girl who falls from grace in Bangkok's corrupt sex work industry, cautioning against moral transgression. These women are often assumed to lack discernment, in need of protection that usually takes the form of paternalistic guidance and patriarchal religious doctrines. The same holds true in Indonesia and Myanmar, where powerful messages about women's role in development overlap with ideas and belief systems of moral duty (Kusakabe and Pearson 2015, 51; Platt 2018, 90). Khin Mar Mar Kyi's examination of Burmese migrant women's feminine obligations in her documentary Dreams of Dutiful Daughters (2013) speaks precisely of the way they are handicapped by familial duty and gender ideals in Myanmar, on top of the exploitation and injustice directed towards them.

In more recent years, FMWs in Singapore and Thailand are represented less as moral agents to emulate than the subject to which empathy, affirmation and tolerance are directed. Racial hierarchies and ethnic biases remain pervasive despite the cultural plurality in these two labour-receiving countries. As part of broader efforts of democratization, liberal frameworks of inclusion and equal rights for minority groups often conceal illiberal policies that maintained their subordination (Kymlicka and He 2005, 14). In neo-colonial Singapore, the inherited divide between anglicized-Chinese elites and racial minorities, including underclass migrants, harks back to British divide-and-rule policies (Goh 2008, 234; Bernards 2019, 302); while in Thailand, a country never formerly colonized by Western powers,⁵ collective notions of belonging organized along ethnic delimitations of Thai and non-Thainess are also forged through ruling class hegemony since the territorialization of the sovereign state (Toyota 2007, 92). Appalling cases of maid abuse that began surfacing in Singapore's news outlets in the early 2000s were perhaps the source of Maid's horror account. The release of Maid's social commentary prompted more engagement with migrant well-being in public media where there was barely any before (Gomes 2011, 142). The same holds true for Ladda in the context of Thailand, where Burmese migrants are often profiled as villains and criminals (Johnson 2013, 310–311). The films, however, made little impact on societies’ perception of FMWs, as attitudes toward these migrants on institutional and interpersonal levels in both countries continued to be exclusionary and discriminatory. What is noteworthy is that these films encapsulate the shifting social status of low-waged migrant workers in the increasingly neoliberal contexts of Singapore's multiculturalism and Thailand's ethnic diversity.

The ghost maids in these films recall the monstrous feminine trope of pontianak or nang nak familiar across supernatural tales in the region (Tan 2010, 152). They stand at the threshold of abjection and the vile undead afflicted with trauma and discontent, where the power asymmetry between master and slave is destabilized. Tellingly, it is only upon confronting Rosa in a cathartic showdown that these deep-seated xenophobic animosities are expunged, and a new moral paradigm of recognition premised on values of righteousness and individual capability embodied by the ‘good’ migrant may unfold in Singapore's renewed multiculturalism. Unlike Rosa, Esther from Maid and Makin from Ladda can only disturb the status quo; incapable of fending for themselves in hostile environments, they remain consigned to obscurity. This same sense of moral revivification revolving around the ‘good’ FMW subject in Maid also plays out in Ilo Ilo⁶; diligent, earnest and relentlessly determined, Terry finally earns her employers’ respect and recognition. Migrant agency in these films is repeatedly performed along a neoliberal ethic of individual responsibility that reduces precarity to a matter of sheer misfortune and incompetence (Wacquant 2009, 9–10). The onus consequently falls on individual migrants to empower themselves, while employers are allowed to ‘disavow their personal culpability’ when ill-treatment and bullying are hyperbolized in these dramas and simply encouraged to be kindly and approving, Kenneth Paul Tan notes (2010, 165). The issue of migrant welfare is reduced to a matter of grievance and cultural difference between employer and employee, absolving the state of responsibility to ensure better labour protections for precarious workers. The budding pathos reflected in Ilo Ilo is not necessarily indicative of the city-state's readiness for equity and diversity; set during the 1997 financial crisis of mass retrenchment, it urges for a more tolerant acceptance towards an essential army of migrant workforce undertaking jobs way below living wages to support the economy – a nationwide call synchronous with its top-down multicultural ethos.

Migrant hauntings are not always denotative of agency; Burmese domestic helper Gee remains a spectral and enigmatic presence after her mysterious death in The Isthmus (2013). An arthouse production funded by Thailand's Ministry of Culture and other international humanitarian organizations, the film sets out as a critique of prejudice against Burmese migrants. The Kra Isthmus river separating Thailand and Myanmar that Gee's spirit leads her employers across serves as a metaphor for the bordered demarcation that organizes the numerous ethnic identities in Thailand, citizen and non-citizen. In a bid to restore compassion towards dispossessed peoples and displaced migrants living along the Burmese border zones, Gee's moving influence on her Thai employers inspires them to see past these arbitrary bordered walls. Though Isthmus purports to tackle the ambitious task of bridging difference, the film eventually conforms to a similar logic as Ilo Ilo, as discriminatory structures of citizenship and immigration in Thailand are left unaddressed. Whether they are reifications of Third World typecasts or moral agents, figures of FMWs that I have outlined above are constituted within cinematic frames of recognition. These filmic fields of recognizability are largely informed by dominant ideologies that determine their utilitarian place and social status in society. But the contemporaneous emergence of contesting frames across the region, as I aim to show in the following section, also offers alternative frames of recognition that re-orients understandings of their precarious lives.

Alternative frames of agency and precarity

South East Asia's eclectic corpus of independent cinema has contributed extensively to edifying socio-political conversations in the region, while pushing boundaries of otherwise sanitized, tokenistic and Eurocentric metanarratives. To circumvent strict censorship and co-optation within state directives, films are frequently produced outside government-funded bodies and circulated across international film festivals. Phuttiphong Aroonpheng's Manta Ray (2018) and Yeo Siew Hua's A Land Imagined (2018) are two such appraisals of migration and dispossession that have received critical acclaim from Venice, Toronto and Locarno, among many prominent others. Screened across global and local stages, these films are able to bring regional issues on migration into wider conversations that are taking place across international circuits. Smaller-scale migrant-themed festivals have also recently emerged in the region alongside international ones. The Migrant Poetry Festival and the Migrant Film Festival in Singapore, and the Global Migrant Film Festival in Bangkok are examples of localized events organized by non-government organizations, activist collectives and cultural practitioners that play crucial roles in enriching the region's cultural dynamism.

Mandalay and Remittance's exploration of migrant subjectivity and agency appears as interventions against dominant prescriptions of FMW subjectivities. Other key examples include Palme d’Or recipient Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours (2002) and Mobile Men (2009), renowned for playfully reworking the authorial gaze at migrant otherness in Thailand (Ingawanij and MacDonald 2010, 130). A certain degree of agency is also afforded to institutionally voiceless Burmese migrants through their opacity in Weerasethakul's films. Documentaries featuring FMWs like Baby Ruth Villarama's Sunday Beauty Queen (2016) and Ani Ema Susanti's ‘Effort for love’ (‘Mengusahakan Cinta’) similarly depart from hackneyed depictions of agency and victimization by eliciting the multiplicity of experiences and desires among queer and female migrants. Emi Susanti's ‘Effort for love', the first short film segment in Nia Dinata’s documentary project, At Stake (Pertaruhan), which seeks to open up about taboo issues surrounding Indonesian women, introduces two very different FMWs working in Hong Kong: one is a pious kartini⁷ wary of losing her virginity through a medical examination, and the other is happily engaged in a same-sex relationship prohibited in her conservative Islamic community back home. Composed in a similar vein to the rest of Dinata's documentary, ‘Effort’ traces the ways in which two very different women navigate, sidestep and are constrained by demands of gender and sexuality mores (Rony 2012, 163). Though considerably limited in addressing their precarity and gruelling work conditions in their host country, the film offers no set answers to questions of victimization, agency and their predicament.

Remittance and Mandalay were released in 2015 and 2016 respectively, as struggles for migrant rights across South East Asia continued to be met with considerable resistance, with the result that labour protections remained loosely enforced and overlooked (Loong 2019, 5; Bal 2015, 220). At the same time, issues concerning migrants and refugees were also gaining traction on regional stages and normalized across global ones. Produced on a shoestring budget largely through crowdfunding sources, Remittance appears to target an audience that differs from typical arthouse festival goers. Apart from smaller-scale film festivals like Metro Manila and those in North America, Remittance was never screened in mainstream theatres or esteemed arthouse festivals, due perhaps in part to its lack of commercial value. The film was instead marketed as an educational resource on its distributor's website,⁸ which consists of a list of reviews from notable academics including Karen Miller, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Oona Paredes who described the film as a ‘real life’ accompaniment to coursework related to the feminization of labour migration and economic globalization. Other film screenings were also initiated by tertiary institutions, non-governmental bodies and advocacy groups invested in migrant workers’ rights and welfare (Sindie 2017). Directed by anthropologists and filmmakers Patrick Daly and Joel Fendelman, the film was largely informed by the real-life domestic workers who were cast as actors (Remittance Film 2015). To incorporate their voices and personal experiences, the narrative relied extensively on the workers’ direction in the story-telling process. The result is a microcosmic tale of labour migration in contemporary times, delivered by FMWs who managed to regain substantial control over their own representation as people rather than as labour in a world where they are often misrecognized as such (Sindie 2017).

Mandalay by contrast reached out to a wider audience: apart from making its festival rounds at Venice, Toronto, Cannes and Busan, the film was also screened domestically. The publication of social critiques in Myanmar like those of Midi Z marks a consequential shift in the Burmese media and cinema industry since its stultification during the five decades of military rule (Chan 2016; Ferguson 2012, 24). Despite the nation's democratization in 2011, censorship laws remain firmly in place; content considered taboo or sacrilegious such as Mandalay's final scene of a blood-splattered icon of Buddha was cut during the screening at the Memory! Film Festival in Yangon. Since the debut of his first feature film, Return to Burma (2011), Myanmar-born Taiwanese filmmaker Midi Z has continued to reaffirm the never-ending turmoil among the poor and marginalized in Poor Folk (2012), Ice Poison (2014), and his two documentaries, Jade Miners (2015) and City of Jade (2016). The theme of disillusionment is salient across his oeuvre, as his films draw heavily on reneged assurances of democracy and social mobility since Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League of Democracy's watershed victory in 2012 against the military junta. The film's intimation of poverty faced among ethnic minorities upends the Orientalist image of Burma's idyllic landscape that its title in English alludes to. Named after Rudyard Kipling's renowned poem, ‘The Road to Mandalay’, the title is contrasted against its rendering in the Chinese vernacular spoken among Shan minorities, 再见瓦城 or ‘Goodbye Mandalay’. The diverging directions denoted in both titles – ‘the road to’ and ‘goodbye’ – draws on a similar sense of disenchantment that would underpin the entire narrative. Although set in Thailand, the film is as much a social commentary about migrant exploitation in Thailand as it is about the dogmatic moral economy that Burmese women are bound to. Intimate portraits of FMW protagonists are foregrounded against their social and material realities in both films. In the same way that migrant categories are destabilized in Blissfully Yours and ‘Effort’, migrant agency in Remittance and Mandalay appears to be defined as an otherwise fixed entity, but an active language of acquiescing, relating, negotiating, navigating, reclaiming and resisting makes it thoroughly interconnected with the wider political economy of feminized migration and transnational labour arbitrage.

Remittance

Both films open with the two migrant protagonists, Marie and Lianqing, as they journey from Davao City in the Philippines and Shan State in Myanmar for Singapore and Bangkok respectively, drawn to prospects of economic opportunity and more sustainable lives. In Remittance, Marie's arrival in Singapore is welcomed with scenes of modern skyscrapers in a dissolve transition from Davao City, signalling a sense of hope and new beginning in the thriving global financial hub. But the city's glossy veneer portends a darker reality where low-waged migrant workers also reside. As soon as she enters the house, her passport is taken away from her under the pretence of safekeeping to ensure that her mobility is restricted; Marie is also made to live, sleep and eat in segregated spaces from her employers. Not only is she driven to work tirelessly as a maid in Singapore to support her family back home, she is treated like a second-class citizen. After learning that her husband Edwardo had squandered away her hard-earned money, she undertakes another job during her time off to support her children, exclaiming to him over the phone, ‘I’m working so damn hard … I’m working like a slave to be able to send money to you, for your plans’. As the sole breadwinner of her family, Marie is obliged to fulfil uneven domestic duties compared with her husband.

Although she appears to possess neither freedom nor agency as a low-waged migrant worker, she nevertheless manages to find happiness in friendships with her fellow migrant friends, including a budding romance with a Bangladeshi worker. Despite her restricted mobility, Marie manages to leave the house without her employers knowing. More importantly, she resists Edwardo's authority and opposes family pressures by remitting her earnings directly to her daughter, and she chooses to lead a separate life unrestrained by his domineering ways when she returns to Davao City. By the end of the film, she learns to become self-sufficient and starts her own hair salon back home. Remittance opens up alternative possibilities of framing FMWs other than as victims of exploitation or martyrs passively subscribing to moral values imposed onto them by patriarchal dictates and that of the nation state; throughout the film, Marie and her fellow companions are depicted as capable individuals actively transforming their precarious and oppressive realities, and their transnational community networks and the moral economies around them. Unlike Ilo Ilo, the politics of recognition plotted out in Remittance extends beyond employer-employee relations, even as Marie gradually grows more amicable with her Filipino expatriate employer. In a brief conversation between the two, compassion and concern take the place of pity and approval. A less hierarchical relation is established, as Marie's employer expresses her sympathies towards the economic hardships and familial demands that OFWs face back home in the Philippines. The film affords recognition to FMWs in a way that centres their needs rather than that of the nation state's, as her empowerment is sustained through collective belonging and a support system from church members, social workers and fellow migrant friends. Like Lola Amaria's Sunday Morning in Victoria Park (2010) and Baby Ruth Villarama's Sunday Beauty Queen (2016), Remittance is ultimately a heartening celebration of communion and convivial life in a global world order where racialized and underclass migrant women are continuously disempowered.

The Road to Mandalay

From the outset, Mandalay's narrative appears to conform to the same didactic register as other Thai classics centred around the guileless, rural girl who falls from grace in Bangkok's corrupt sex work industry such as Chatrichalerm Yukol's Hotel Angel (1974) and Paul Spurrier's P (2005). Enchanted by Bangkok's metropolis, Lianqing similarly comes across as a bright-eyed villager, determined to escape rural life. Her optimism, however, is soon undercut by murky silences surrounding employment hardships and inflated reassurances about working in Thailand when she is introduced to other undocumented Burmese migrants with whom she would be sharing an apartment. As the camera cuts to the next scene, the Burmese women move behind a veiled partition, and the silhouetted bodies outlined on screen emerge as a disquieting visual metaphor for Thailand's hidden workforce, operating behind closed doors and concealed from public eye. This premonitory sign is carried forward in a following sequence where Lianqing is interviewed for a salesgirl position in an office overlooking Bangkok's metropolitan skyline. The interviewer's salacious comment on her friend's ‘sexier’ appearance is a giveaway to the inhumane industry in which Lianqing hopes to find employment. The parallel between the FMWs and Hermès Birkin bags on display is suggestive of the similar process of exploitation that human bodies and reptilian commodities are subjected to in the manufacturing of the luxurious good. Without documentation, however, she ends up working in an eatery where she is underpaid and subjected to her customers’ lewd stares, and thereafter, a silk factory after an immigration raid on Lianqing's apartment. Behind the factory walls, workers are depicted against railings that recall prison cells; they are tagged to a number and reduced to a dehumanized cog in the factory machinery. The realities of working as an undocumented migrant without legal protection in Thailand finally dawns on Lianqing when a fellow worker loses his leg during a power outage in the factory and is causally dismissed after receiving nominal remuneration. One crisis follows another, as Lianqing's search for work becomes enmeshed with a cruel immigration system that profits from bailouts and selling permits to the disenfranchised. Lianqing, however, persists in acquiring legal documents to work as a salesgirl for the same company selling the Hermès bags despite warnings from her male companion, Guo. In a nightmarish sequence of her first sales job, a terrified Lianqing is pictured cornered against the window in a hotel room with the same view of the glimmering cityscape in what appears to be a rape scene, as a giant lizard crawls against her defenceless body.

In spite of her naivety, Lianqing's resolute drive to manoeuvre around punishing circumstances to reclaim her independence and freedom call into question the paternalistic logics of morality and protection that demand for Burmese women to be necessarily weak and subordinate. As Lianqing grows disenchanted with working in Thailand, her dogged resolution to be financially self-sufficient becomes problematic for Guo. Throughout the film, he follows her every move, brings her under his protection and hinders her from applying for documentation in Thailand as he wishes to return to Myanmar to start a family with her. Guo's watchful surveillance appears analogous with the recurring scenes of Buddha's protective icon overlooking Lianqing's sleeping body from the ceiling; it appears that Guo's paternalistic ways operate in the same way as the moral-religious institution that supposedly guides and protects in order to subject Burmese women to patriarchal authority and control. Unsurprisingly, the final scene chosen to be censored at the Yangon Film Festival consists of the same icon of Buddha splattered with blood, as Guo stabs her in her sleep for defying his wishes. In the redacted version, the film concludes with the only permissible narrative: that of a fallen woman deserving of her transgression. Z leverages these frames of precarity to scrutinize not only the links between neoliberal capitalism and migration, as Ran Ma notes (2020, 203), but also the paternalistic gaze and oppressive moral schemes compelling women to be recognized as such, as the film's harrowing end draws on the vicious consequences for Burmese women who resist and refuse to be weak.

Conclusion

In conclusion, this paper attempted to illustrate the various ways in which figurations of FMWs and their agencies on screen are encoded with moral and affective bias. Fields of recognition operate within depoliticized, tokenistic and affirmative scripts, including neo-Marxist frameworks that seek to bring attention to the layered structures of dominance underpinning the feminization of labour migration. FMWs end up essentialized as meek and hapless ‘Third World women’. Placing FMWs on heroic pedestals does little to alter their plights, as does advocating affirmative sentiments towards the racialized migrant worker. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon's enquiry into the rationality of asymmetrical and non-reciprocal recognition elicits these very complex underpinnings of colonial subordination. For him, the struggle for ‘recognition as an independent self-consciousness’ is pivotal to dismantling the universalism of the colonizers’ laws (2008, 170). Although Remittance and Mandalay espouse neither an open rebellion against oppressive dictates nor collective action against systemic injustice, the films elicit prosaic acts of struggle and self-determination, and also their innumerable constraints. In this paper, I have chosen to examine the filmic potentials of two recent productions that are situated within the transnational nexus of labour migration in the region. And through these frames, FMWs’ precarity may be better apprehended; along with their immediate desires and needs to cope and survive, agency too is afforded recognition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘Agency’, n. Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/3851?redirectedFrom=agency#eid.

2 Examples are the multimedia MTV EXIT (End Exploitation and Trafficking) campaign launched in 2004 and UNODC (2015).

3 Notable ones include Yeo Siew Hua's A Land Imagined (2018), Phuttiphong Aroonpheng's Manta Ray (2018), Lei Yuan Bin's I Dream of Singapore (2019) and Rodd Rathjen's Buoyancy (2019).

4 Although women's agency and their negotiation with self-identity, independence and loyalties are mentioned in Michele Gamburd’s (2003) ‘Breadwinner No More’, the chapter concludes with their eventual submission to their husbands.

5 Thailand is often said to have auto-colonized during its encounter with British colonial powers since the formation of its territorially bounded nation state. For more on postcolonial Thailand, refer to Harrison (2011).

6 Other films include Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo's Singapore Dreaming (2006) where dynamics between employers and FMWs play out marginally.

7 For more on kartini, refer to Tiwon (1996).

8 Outcast Films, as of 1 October 2020. https://outcast-films.com.