Women Migrant Workers, Art, and Power to Speak

Principle Investigator：Aurbey Fanani, MA student, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (UST), NYCU

Living a long way home and working live-in in the employer’s home, make women migrant domestic workers isolated from their social life. They tend to stigmatize as unintellectual, uneducated, and lower people. As a subaltern group, they choose art as a medium to speak, to break the stigma and empower their community. Migrant Workers Labor Union (SBMI) in Wonosobo, Indonesia, for instance, made the short films “Rindu Utami” and “Impian Negeri Berkabut”. These films aim to provide a picture of how unsafety pathways could end human trafficking. The film is based on their experience of becoming domestic workers and human trafficking victims. The films are independently produced by their community, and the actors are ex-migrant workers who are voluntarily involved in the film without payment. The films were screened in villages that were often targeted by illegal agents. Etik Nurhalimah, a caretaker who has worked in Taiwan since 2011, tries to break the stigma that domestic migrant workers are uneducated people by writing and teaching. Now she is living a double life in Taipei, as a domestic worker, and as a writer. In 2020, she was also awarded the “Taiwan Literature Award for Migrants” for her work about the uncertain conditions that migrant workers face during the pandemic.