Mobilizing Piety: Gendered Morality and Indonesian-Saudi Transnational Migration

摘要

This paper focuses on the emotional discourses invoked in efforts to frame and control Indonesian women's labor migration to Saudi Arabia. Based on interviews with migrant recruiters, state officials, and migrants in West Java, as well as data collected by migrant rights activists, the paper examines the emotional vocabularies and imagined geographies of gendered piety that are deployed in attempts to mobilize, direct, and discipline women's transnational labor migration. It explores articulations of women's virtue as a key dimension of the moral geographies of Indonesian women's overseas migration. More broadly, it suggests that such attention to struggles over the regulation of emotion can serve as a lens onto the ways in which gender articulates with the religiously-inflected transnational labor market linking Indonesia with Saudi Arabia.