The Interaction of Country of Origin,Acculturation, and Gender Role Ideology on Wife Abuse*

Objective. Using data from the Mexican American Prevalence and Services Survey ( Vega et al., 1998 ), this research tests whether the impact of acculturation and gender role ideology on wife abuse depends on country of origin. Methods. Two separate logistic regressions, one for U.S.‐born Latinas and one for Mexican‐born Latinas, are compared to test the impact of the interaction of place of origin with the other variables. Results. Our findings support earlier research indicating that power dynamics within a relationship impact the likelihood of a wife reporting she has experienced abuse. Significant differences in the influence of independent variables are found when comparing U.S.‐ and Mexican‐born respondents. In particular, variables related to family power dynamics operate differently. Gender role beliefs, however, have an independent influence for both groups after controlling for sociodemographic factors and power dynamics. Women with more traditional orientations are less likely to report abuse. Conclusions. Because the impact of gender role ideology is significant and in the same direction for both those born in the United States and those born in Mexico, it is unlikely that the traditional familism and gender role orientations reported among the Mexican born afford them greater protection against abuse.     

Who gets ‘Left behind’? Promises and pitfalls in making the global development agenda work for sex workers – reflections from Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) do, at least on a rhetorical level, tie countries and other development actors to a rights-based vision of development, which expressly includes labour rights, migrant rights and women’s rights. Despite this, sex workers continue to migrate and work in the margins where rights are difficult to claim. In looking for sex work in the SDGs, we ask how the SDGs respond to the rights of sex workers and whether more needs to be read into the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development so that states are able to keep the new promise that no one be ‘left behind’? In investigating this issue, we draw upon research conducted in the Southeast Asian region and in Cambodia in particular. In analysing the commitment that development should be inclusive in ways that ‘leave no one behind’, we raise concerns about the target-driven nature of the SDG development agenda that may well prove incapable of mediating the heated debates over the understandings of sex work that play out at both the international and the local level.     

Stitching-up the labour market

In mainstream International Political Economy (IPE) writings on globalization, the multinational corporation (MNC) is placed at the centre of the emergence of a global market economy. Allied to this view is the normative position that these firms will have a positive, developmental impact on the states that they invest in. This article presents a gendered political economy perspective on the process of foreign direct investment (FDI), arguing that liberal IPE has failed to understand adequately the impact of the MNC on host states because of its attachment to ideas of rational action and modernization, and its assumption that the market is a gender-neutral space. By contrast, in this article, I argue that by looking at the gendered nature of recruitment practices within an MNC we are forced to confront the way in which firms work with existing inequalities embedded in the economy of the host state in order to secure a supply of low cost labour. The article presents case study research from an MNC operating in Malaysia, focusing on how company recruitment intersects with local social divisions based upon gender, ethnicity as well as age, rural–urban divides, class and education. I suggest that via its recruitment strategies, the firm plays a role in the construction of gendered and racialized inequalities. I argue that the MNC needs to be investigated as a site for the active construction of gendered identities across globalizing production lines, thus moving away from the traditional focus of feminist analysis of East Asian development on the experiences of the workers themselves.     

Bridging refugee youth and children's services: a case study of cross-service training

Bridging Refugee Youth and Children's Services(BRYCS), a public-private partnership between the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, provides national technical assistance to public child welfare. After a series of "community conversations," BRYCS identified a lack of knowledge among child welfare staff about newcomer refugees, negative stereotypes, and a fear of child protective services among refugees. BRYCS initiated a number of technical assistance initiatives, including a pilot cross-service training project in St. Louis to strengthen collaboration between child welfare and refugee-serving agencies. This article details the lessons learned from this training and recommends changes in policy and practice.     

Producing Migrant Domestic Work: Exploring the Everyday Political Economy of Malaysia's ‘Maid Shortage’

Abstract

The article considers how the employment of domestic workers by middle-class Malaysian households has been thrown into flux by the imposition of bans on the sending of workers by states such as Indonesia and Cambodia, as well as the decline in numbers of women seeking employment as domestic workers in Malaysia and rising employment costs. This article does not seek to focus on the high-level policy negotiations and disputes that have come to characterize systems of temporary return migration for domestic work in Asia, but to focus in on the everyday political economies (of social reproduction, work, and everyday agency) that constitute the conditions of possibility within which bilateral disputes and labour agreements between Southeast Asian states take shape. We examine three dimensions of migration for domestic work in Southeast Asia in ways that bring together literatures on everyday life and social reproduction. These interconnected yet distinct dimensions are (a) the relationship between strategies to boost remittances and flows of workers from some of the most impoverished parts of Southeast Asia; (b) the centrality of low-cost migrant domestic workers to Malaysian middle-class ‘success stories’, and (c) the day-to-day production of ‘good’ worker subjects—a process that is actively and constantly resisted by workers themselves. The article provides important insights into the mechanisms through arenas of everyday life—and the household in particular—are transformed; becoming sites for the ever widening and deepening of the market economy.     

Feminist Global Political Economies of the Everyday: From Bananas to Bingo

Abstract

Feminist studies of political economy have long pointed to the multifaceted ways in which global transformations are constituted by deeply gendered economic practices at the everyday level. Nonetheless, the increased analytical focus on the everyday within the study of international political economy (IPE) frequently fails to connect with feminist theories and gendered approaches. In this introductory essay, we argue that any discussion of a ‘turn’ towards the everyday in IPE must acknowledge the role of feminist contributions that predate, and indeed make possible, this shift in IPE scholarship's analytical gaze towards the everyday. We map out what might be understood as feminist political economies of the everyday—highlighting the points of connection between feminist scholarship on the everyday, as well as the ways in which feminist scholars engage with the notion of an everyday political economy in quite distinct and diverse ways—a diversity that reflects the methodological and theoretical pluralism of feminist political economy scholarship as well as the ever broadening geographical scope of feminist research.     

Foreign Policy and the Domestic Worker

In 2009, following numerous high profile abuse cases, the Indonesian government placed a moratorium on its citizens taking up employment in Malaysia as domestic workers. From the perspective of feminist International Relations, the emergence of migrant domestic work as a foreign policy concern between these two states is significant – exposing a relationship between foreign policy and the webs of transnationalized social relations of reproduction that underpin the development prospects of middle to low income states. In this article I utilize the example of the Malaysia–Indonesia dispute in order to develop some tentative suggestions concerning the possibility of integrating an analysis of transnational social relations of reproduction into foreign policy analyses. The article initially overviews how the dispute is widely understood in relation to Indonesia's turn to a more democratic foreign policy. The inadequacy of such a reading is explored further. The article suggests that the above-mentioned dispute should rather be understood in relation to the specific configurations of productive–reproductive relations that underpin migratory flows and the role of Indonesia and Malaysia as ‘regulatory’ states involved in the establishment of return-migration systems in which women migrants are viewed as economic commodities and policed via a range of state-sanctioned practices (including commitments to anti-trafficking).