Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Using a systemic and institutional analysis of transnational dynamics in the recruiting, hiring and placement of Vietnamese female migrants in domestic work in Saudi Arabia, this article showcases the experiences of Vietnamese female domestic workers in Saudi Arabia and contributes to the social protection and migrant domestic worker literatures. It contributes a critical analysis on whether bilateral labor agreements can be mechanisms for social protection of migrants. Focusing on the case of Vietnam, I argue that the bilateral labor agreement (bla) signed between Vietnam and Saudi Arabia, enacted by the Vietnamese labor brokerage state and the Saudi Kafala systems, is a form structural violence because it fails to provide social welfare and protection for Vietnamese women domestic workers. In this systemic/structural violence, intersectionality shows that not all female workers suffer the same since ethnic minority workers most often suffer more than the majority (Kinh) female workers. Moreover, inside the Kafeel (the employer/sponsor) homes of this system, most of these female workers suffer, as unfree labor, from being transferred from one house to another, resulting in precarity, cycle of debt and dispossession of their rights.

Drawing on Foucault's concepts of biopolitical subject formation and governmentality, this article seeks to understand transnational state power and how Vietnamese migrant workers negotiate within a transnational framework both while working in Malaysia and upon their return to Vietnam. By conducting multi-sited interviews in Vietnam and Malaysia between 2008 and 2015, we contribute to the transnational labor migration literature by focusing on Vietnamese factory and construction workers in Malaysia and their resistance to transnational state power. We argue that these two emerging economies, as part of the neoliberal world, use their systems, media, and technologies to produce and manage citizens (in Vietnam) and non-citizen subjects (migrants in Malaysia) who comply with labor export policy and foreign worker policy, respectively. These two states ensure both government and individual accumulation to sustain their power. Meanwhile, Vietnamese migrant subjects negotiate their roles, resist when necessary, and at times, even benefit from overseas labor migration.