This article discusses the role of a key actor in contemporary migration, namely recruitment and placement agencies, in the globalized economy of domestic labour. By focusing on two key migration “industries” in Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Indonesia, this article reveals how the discourses and practices of recruitment and placement agencies contribute to the making of the “ideal maid”. First, the article examines the making of labouring bodies through recruitment practices in countries of origin, and secondly, it shows how migrant women’s attitudes are normalized in an attempt to make them correspond to foreign employers’ (supposed) expectations. Finally, the article explores how logics of othering shape the recruitment and, even more so, the placement of migrant domestic workers in destination countries such as Malaysia. By considering bodies in their material and symbolic dimensions, the article points out how domestic workers are progressively produced as a “docile” labour force and as a figure of alterity in the globalized economy of domestic work.

This article discusses the role of a key actor in contemporary migration, namely recruitment and placement agencies, in the globalized economy of domestic labour. By focusing on two key migration "industries" in Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Indonesia, this article reveals how the discourses and practices of recruitment and placement agencies contribute to the making of the "ideal maid". First, the article examines the making of labouring bodies through recruitment practices in countries of origin, and secondly, it shows how migrant women's attitudes are normalized in an attempt to make them correspond to foreign employers'(supposed) expectations. Finally, the article explores how logics of othering shape the recruitment and, even more so, the placement of migrant domestic workers in destination countries such as Malaysia. By considering bodies in their material and symbolic dimensions, the article points out how domestic workers are progressively produced as a "docile" labour force and as a figure of alterity in the globalized economy of domestic work.

Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork in and around a Malaysian apartment building, this paper explores discourses on and practices of friendship among young Iranian residents. The paper argues that for Iranians in Malaysia, most of them students, forming close social ties always holds the risk not only of personal betrayal but also of political infiltration, and thus making friends is informed by suspicion, anxiety and ambivalence. In the context of both formal state surveillance and informal moral policing in the high-rise, Iranian students often choose to ‘keep their distance’ from other Iranians. By analysing quotidian mutual observation and questioning, mistrust, but also forms of sociality that develop in the dense, cosmopolitan urban contact zone of an apartment building, this paper teases out conflicted narratives about intimacy and distance, and argues that these must be understood in the context of the local, material urban landscape of the high-rise, the uncertainty of life in transit as well as the political context of Post-Revolution Iran.

In this article I explore 'belonging' both in terms of personal relatedness and national belonging in the context of Indonesian domestic worker migration to Malaysia. Riddled with metaphors of kinship both on the level of diplomatic ties between the two 'kin states' of Indonesia and Malaysia as well as on the level of intimate relations between employers and employees, the migration of Indonesian domestic workers to Malaysia allows for a critical analysis of the ways in which boundaries are drawn and redrawn on the political as well as on the intimate level of daily coexistence. The article argues that kinship provides a fruitful avenue from which to consider belonging in context of the specific relations between Indonesia and Malaysia and explores how belonging to the family and the nation is negotiated by Indonesian domestic workers, Malaysian employers and so-called 'maid agents'.

This article explores dominant discourses on ‘illegal’ migrants in the context of contemporary Indonesian labour migration to Malaysia. By focusing on the particular case of migrant domestic workers, it discusses recent political moves undertaken by both nation-states to regularise migratory movements. These state-induced efforts at regularising transnational migration have been promoted as combating trafficking and ‘illegal’ migration, but they have led to the legitimisation of a migration scheme that has much in common with colonial indentured labour. Hence, the paper argues that this ‘legal,’ state-sanctioned migration scheme gradually leads domestic workers into ‘legal’ — but bonded — labour arrangements and that the labour contract, as such, needs to be analysed as an instrument of subordination. Through the counter-narrative of Arum, an Indonesian domestic worker performing her work ‘illegally’ in Malaysia, the paper then goes on to argue that to migrate through ‘illegal’ migration channels can be interpreted as an act of voluntarily circumventing the ‘legal,’ state-sanctioned migration scheme. Thus, ‘illegal’ migration can be equated with deliberately resisting a coercive system.

Indonesia is one of the major labour sending countries in contemporary Asia. While Indonesians, and especially the Javanese, have a long tradition of mobility, what has been called the "institutionalisation" of labour exporting started in the 1870's, under Dutch colonial rule. At that time, migrant workers originating from Java were mostly male "coolies" sent to work as indentured labourers on mines and plantations on the Indonesian Outer Islands. Nowadays, women represent the overwhelming majority of migrant workers departing from Indonesia, and most of them are sent abroad as domestic workers. Interestingly, even though indentured labour has officially been abolished in Indonesia in 1932, the contemporary system of contract labour migration is in many ways very similar to nineteenth and twentieth century indentured labour. By looking in particular at the practices of state and non-state actors involved in the "export" of Indonesian maids to Malaysia, this paper seeks to analyse the processes that migrant domestic workers go through in Indonesia before being able to migrate to Malaysia and how these processes affect their situation both before and after their departure. In fact, the moment of "pre-departure" lasts for months and involves many different actors, such as local brokers, recruitment agents or government officials the overwhelming majority of whom are male. Developed in the context of a comparative research on bonded labour in Southeast Asia and grounded in ethnographic research carried out both in Indonesia and Malaysia, this paper focuses on one particular stage of international labour migration. It aims at understanding whether and how the particular "moment" of pre-departure eventually gives rise to contemporary forms of bondage in transnational domestic service.