(Re)Negotiating Intimacy in Labor Migration Contexts Women Migrant Workers in Beirut

Abstract

Migration studies generally tend to sideline the personal and the intimate in migrants’ trajectories. Analyses of labor migration are largely flawed by a focus on economic necessity and accounts on labor migrants are overly structural. In the context of Lebanon, academic publications and grey literature have portrayed women migrant workers as helpless victims of the inherently abusive sponsorship system, Kafala. The infamous Kafala and the abuse of women migrant workers are well documented but the trends of female agency countering the hardships of this particular migration have yet to be investigated. Motivated by a concern for social struggles taking place at the seemingly weakest intersection of race, gender, class, and immigration status, and seeking to steer away from the traditional paradigms, this research investigates the personal trajectories of women migrant workers in Lebanon with a focus on their ‘romantic’ intimate lives. It examines the interplay between global and local processes, public and private spheres, and the ‘free visa’ system, to identify how ‘freelance’ women migrant workers navigate the labor migration process and how this process becomes consequential in accounts of the intimate. As it seeks to understand how women migrant workers (re-)negotiate romantic intimacy and what intimacy-related patterns arise in contexts of high-structural violence, the research follows a multiple-case study design based on the country of origin. It adopts the framework of labor migration-specific intimacy field and national-belonging field and examines the role of gender capital.