Sexual, Reproductive, and Family Rights of African Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon

The employment rights of migrant domestic workers in the Arab region have been receiving increasing attention.  In contrast, concern for their rights to have a family, and to care for their own children, has been virtually absent in scholarly writings.  This is alarming especially considering that Arab culture is deeply family-oriented and the wellbeing and social status of women in it are entwined with their gendered role as mothers and care-takers.

Through structural arrangements and in the views of employers, the domestic worker is, at best, portrayed as a genderless, de-sexualized, and de-familialized worker.  Having a family is seen as inherently incompatible with the job description of a live-in domestic worker.  On their part, migrant domestic workers resist these portrayals by narrating how their children are omnipresent in their lives.  They develop strategies to reduce the impact of the long-term separation from their children by re-configuring the meanings of motherhood and care-giving so as to preserve their self-esteem as good mothers.  As Hondagneu-Sotelo has previously argued in her work on Latina domestic workers in the United States, African migrant workers engage in transnational mothering, whereby they emphasize the importance of the long-distance financial care they provide to their children.  The paper presents a case for examining the gendered aspects of migration in the Arab region, how structures in the host country impinge on domestic workers’ wellbeing through denying them basic rights, and how women themselves resist and develop ways of coping to enhance their health and wellbeing.