(Re)Making Home(s) on the Move: Sri Lankan Live-in Migrant Domestic Workers in Kuwait^*

Abstract

Transnational migration has produced a state of flux in the naturalized conception of home as a fixed, bounded, discreet and trouble-free place of origin, (re)casting home as a more complex, or perhaps simpler, project entangled within the workings of the global capitalist economy. In this context, here the author qualitatively explores migrants’ engagement with the notion of home in the sense of how they conceptualize and experience home, based on the lived experiences of Sri Lankan women who have migrated to Kuwait as live-in migrant domestic workers (MDWs) independently of their families. The stories of the MDWs simultaneously made the meaning of home as conventionally defined, more straightforward and more complicated: home was taken on a journey with them to a faraway foreign land. The MDWs negotiated and constructed belonging and not belonging dialectically in multiple homes, thus being simultaneously “here,” “there” and “nowhere.” In migration, home thus manifests the evolution of female power and duty, portraying it at once as a locus of women’s liberation and as new and perhaps more extreme forms of (re)subjectivation in the emplacement of home within global capitalism. Migration performs home as a space in the (un)making: an ongoing project through the course of life.

Citation

Handapangoda, W. (2024), "(Re)Making Home(s) on the Move: Sri Lankan Live-in Migrant Domestic Workers in Kuwait^*", Costa, R.P. and Blair, S.L. (Ed.) More than Just a ‘Home’: Understanding the Living Spaces of Families (Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research, Vol. 25), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 95-113. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1530-353520240000025005