Résumés
Abstract
Since the 1970s, Southeast Asia women have turned to outward labour migration to Hong Kong to enhance their economic livelihoods. However, while their overseas work afforded the possibility of improved material conditions back home, migrants face an array of ethnic, classed, and gendered subjugations during their temporary placements abroad. Hopeful for futures beyond domestic labour, some migrant workers engage in intimate exchanges with Euro-American expatriate men in Hong Kong’s entertainment district in Wanchai. Indeed, these relations do not entirely offset their ethnic and classed minoritization. But, becoming short-term partners, long-term girlfriends, or eventual wives provide alternative pathways for navigating their disenfranchisement as racialized labourers relegated to the city’s spatial and legal peripheries. Comparably, their expatriate male partners also conveyed their own subjective experiences of dislocation and suffering due to employment redundancy, aging, and past separations. Ethnographic research examining the intimacies forged between these two groups of foreigners in Hong Kong—Southeast Asian migrants seeking better futures, and Euro-American men healing from past employment and emotional traumas—reveal opportunities for expanded aspirational capacities, broadened orientations to the future, and alternative gendered subjectivities. This article explores how the intimacies fostered in Wanchai carve out opportunity to re-envision what might be affectively and materially possible in their futures beyond domestic labour, aging alone, and prolonged economic precarity.
Keywords:
- gendered labour migration,
- intimate labour,
- aspiration,
- Southeast Asia,
- sex work,
- Hong Kong,
- Indonesia,
- Philippines,
- futures
Résumé
Depuis les années 1970, les femmes d’Asie du Sud-Est se sont tournées vers l’immigration de la main-d’oeuvre à Hong Kong pour améliorer leurs moyens de subsistance. Toutefois, si leur travail à l’étranger leur offre la possibilité d’améliorer leurs conditions matérielles dans leur pays d’origine, les migrantes sont confrontées à toute une série d’assujettissements ethniques, de classe et de genre au cours de leurs séjours temporaires à l’étranger. Dans l’espoir d’un avenir autre que le travail domestique, certaines travailleuses migrantes s’engagent dans des relations intimes avec des expatriés euro-américains dans le quartier animé de Wanchai, à Hong Kong. En effet, ces relations ne compensent pas entièrement ni leur minorisation ethnique et ni leur minorisation de classe. Mais le fait de devenir des partenaires à court terme, des petites amies à long terme, ou d’éventuelles épouses, leur offre d’autres alternatives pour surmonter leur exclusion en tant que travailleuses racialisées reléguées aux périphéries spatiales et juridiques de la ville. De même, leurs partenaires masculins expatriés ont également fait part de leurs propres expériences subjectives de déracinement et de souffrances causées par des licenciements, le vieillissement et des séparations antérieures. Cette recherche ethnographique qui examine les relations intimes forgées entre ces deux groupes d’étrangers à Hong Kong – les femmes migrantes d’Asie du Sud-Est à la recherche d’un avenir meilleur et les hommes euro-américains guérissant de traumatismes professionnels et émotionnels passés – révèle des possibilités d’accroître les capacités d’aspiration, d’élargir les orientations vers l’avenir et de créer des subjectivités différentes en fonction du genre. Cet article explore la manière dont les relations intimes entretenues à Wanchai permettent de repenser ce qui pourrait être affectivement et matériellement possible dans leur avenir, au-delà du travail domestique, du vieillissement en solitaire et de la précarité économique prolongée.
Mots-clés :
- migration genrée de la main d’oeuvre,
- travail intime,
- aspiration,
- Asie du Sud-Est,
- travailleuses du sexe,
- Hong Kong,
- Indonésie,
- Philippines,
- avenirs
Parties annexes
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