Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Malini Sur, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

ABSTRACT

This presentation examines migrant women’s vulnerabilities when they are denied access to sexual and reproductive health and services. I look at the confluence of love, labor and the law by focusing on the regulation of migrant women’s sexualities in the Gulf Coast Cooperation countries of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait. Migrant women from sub-Saharan Africa increasingly comprise the majority of migrants to the region as the demand for intimate labor in the Gulf is on the rise. Legally, migrant women do not have access to any sexual or reproductive health services. But migrant women who become pregnant while in the Gulf are immediately imprisoned and charged with the crime of zinna (sex outside of marriage). These women give birth while incarcerated and spend up to a year with their babies in prison; they receive no pre or post-natal care. They are then forcibly separated from their children when they are deported, rendering the children stateless in the host country. Migrant women who are often brought to the Gulf to perform (re)productive labor are seen as immoral if they engage in sexual activities during their time in the Gulf (and this is written into their contracts), and thus are seen as unfit to parent their own children. Contractually, they are sterilized. Some migrant women have recently been protesting these laws by refusing and fighting deportation without their children. This presentation looks at the intersections of health, human rights, and the larger global panic about “human trafficking”. I contrast discourses about migration, human trafficking, and access to public health with lived realities and stories of migrants themselves through ethnographic research conducted in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait City since 2008.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Pardis Mahdavi, PhD is Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Pomona College, USA. Her research interests include gendered labor, human trafficking migration, sexuality, human rights, youth culture, transnational feminism and public health in the context of changing global and political structures. Her first book, Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution was published with Stanford University Press in 2008, and her second book, Gridlock: Labor, Migration and ‘Human Trafficking’ in Dubai, also Stanford University Press, was published in 2011. Her third book, From Trafficking to Terror: Constructing a Global Social Problem was published with Routledge in 2013.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Sharon via email: arios@nus.edu.sg