PhD Candidate Catherine Cheng and Professor Hae Yeon Choo published an article that reviews the literature on women's migration in East and Southeast Asia for the purposes of domestic work and cross-border marriage. The article highlights the interconnections between migration for domestic work and migration for marriage in East and Southeast Asia.
Catherine Cheng is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research interests lie at the intersection of gender, nation-state, migration, labour, and citizenship, with a geographical focus on East Asia. Hae Yeon Choo is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her research centers on gender, transnational migration, and citizenship to examine global social inequality.
We have posted the citation and abstract of the article below. The full text is available through the University of Toronto Library Portal here.
Cheng, Catherine Man Chuen and Hae Yeon Choo. 2015. "Women’s Migration for Domestic Work and Cross-Border Marriage in East and Southeast Asia: Reproducing Domesticity, Contesting Citizenship." Sociology Compass, 9:654-667.
This article offers an integrative review of the literature on women's migration for domestic work and cross-border marriages in East and Southeast Asia. By bringing these two bodies of literature into dialogue, we illuminate the interconnected processes that shape two key forms of women's migration that are embedded in the reproduction of women's domesticity. We highlight structural analyses of the demographic and socio-economic shifts that propel women's migration while also attending to the affective dimension of migrant women's desires and duties and to the brokerages that mediate the migrant flow. We finally examine how migrant wives and domestic workers contest the boundary of citizenship as they claim their full personhood against divergent modes of control over their rights, bodies, and mobility. We conclude by pointing out concrete areas where the two sets of literature can enrich each other for future research on gender, labor, and migration.
Read the full article here.