ABSTRACT

In both historical and contemporary studies of contract mobile labour, little attention has been granted to ageing migrant bodies from a lifecourse perspective. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with older migrant domestic workers in Singapore, this article investigates how, in the context of restrictive regimes of mobility shaping temporary labour migration, age crucially factors into the (im)mobility of migrant domestic workers. Growing older and approaching retirement marks a point of perceived bodily immobility as states and employers deem migrants’ ageing bodies as too frail and no longer productive, thus inducing mandatory returns to their countries of origin. The paper traces how the ageing bodies of ‘temporary’ migrants are discursively constructed by neoliberal regimes of mobile labour; the implications on migrants’ present and future mobilities; and how migrants contest such characterisations of their bodies and attempts at controlling their mobilities at different scales. In considering the later-life implications of long years of work abroad in precarious and low-wage conditions, we see how age becomes important to our intersectional analyses of racialised (im)mobile labour across multiple historical and comparative contexts, and to our understandings of how inequalities are (re)produced over time.

摘要

在历史和当代的契约流动劳动研究中，从生命历程的角度来看，很少有人关注移徙工人的衰老。本文利用在新加坡与较年长的移徙家政工人进行的人种志田野调查，研究了在限制临时工迁移的流动性制度的背景下，年龄是决定移徙家政工人流动性的关键因素的方法。随着国家和雇主认为移民的老龄化机构过于脆弱且不再具有生产能力，退休年龄越来越接近和接近退休标志着人们身体不动的观点，从而迫使他们强制返回其原籍国。该论文追踪了新自由主义流动劳动力制度如何离散地构造“临时”移民的衰老体。对移民现在和将来的流动性的影响；以及移民如何与自己的身体特征抗衡，并试图在不同规模上控制自己的活动能力。在考虑在不稳定和低薪条件下长期在国外工作对晚年的影响时，我们发现年龄对于我们在多种历史和比较背景下对种族化的（流动）流动劳动的交叉分析以及对以下方面的理解如何变得重要随着时间的推移，不平等是如何产生的。