Spaces at the Margins: Migrant Domestic Workers and the Development of Civil Society in Singapore

It has been argued in the feminist literature that the state often contributes to patriarchal constructions of women's subordinate positions by providing political space for women's incorporation into civil society not as individuals and citizens but as members of a family belonging to the private sphere. In this paper the authors explore this question in the broad context of international labour migration in the Asia Pacific region, where migrant women are moving as paid reproductive labour in large numbers from less-developed countries to rapidly industrialising urban nodes in the region. The authors ground the ensuing issues in the specific case of Singapore, a country currently engaged in constructing a sense of nationhood among its people. Even as there is now some debate on the emergence of civil society as part of the nation-building project and possibly a larger role for social agencies which lie outside the rubric of state parameters, there are groups of women who are excluded from this embryonic discourse. One such group is the more than 100 000 female migrant domestic workers (from the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and a number of other South and Southeast Asian countries) who, as women, domestics, and noncitizens, are identified with the confines of the private sphere and proscribed from public space in the dominant (and emerging) discourses. With use of a questionnaire survey, as well as in-depth interviews with foreign domestic workers, their employers, and a number of social organisations, the authors examine the politics of exclusion at the margins of society. The aims are to explore the types of social organisations which have opened up some ‘space’ within their structures for foreign domestic workers, as well as interest groups which have certain claims to represent these women, and to clarify the roles these marginal spaces play. This helps illumine the way these women interact with mainstream Singaporean society beyond the confines of the domestic sphere and broadens the understanding of the boundaries of civil society in Singapore and the politics of being ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.