Paper short abstract:

The bodies of migrant domestic workers (MDWs), by engaging in seemingly simple acts as walking, theatrical performance and protesting, constantly threatened by the memory of deported MDWs, challenge the existing notions of migrant domestic labour as a private domain from which the state is removed.

Paper long abstract:

From a theoretical lens that is located at the intersection of the anthropology of space and place and feminist geography, I propose an examination of the spaces of resistance that Migrant Domestic Workers (MDWs) create in the city of Beirut. To counter the repression imposed on their everyday lives through the kafala (sponsorship) system administering migrant labour in Lebanon, MDWs engage in various forms of embodied resistance. I look at how the act of walking and engaging in temporary placemaking (Low 2014) in the streets challenges the paternalistic sponsorship system that attempts to control MDWs' bodies and limit their movement in the city. Moreover, by performing their political struggles through walking in demonstrations and theatrical enactments, MDWs pose a threat to the existing order that seeks to render racialised and gendered bodies of labour invisible. This is evident in the state actors' attempts to break this embodied presence through deportation and fearmongering. The case studies that will be presented in this work make part of a ten months long engaged ethnography that is based on a larger dissertation project. An intersectional (Valentine 2007) and spatial ethnographic study of MDWs' everyday lives offers an opportunity to study the state at its margins (Das and Poole 2004). Space is conceived here not as a simple container of these social relations but rather as a dialogue between the body and the city (Low 2003) that shifts the understanding of dichotomies such as private/public, visible/invisible, as well as inclusion and exclusion.