Paid Domestic Labour, Economic Security, and Violence: Bangladeshi Women’s Experiences in Saudi Arabia

This paper examines how economic security is at the centre of Bangladeshi women’s experiences of paid domestic labour in Saudi Arabia and how women’s bodies are located as a site of gendered conflict/struggle for economic security. Drawing on the narratives of 18 women migrant domestic workers, this paper considers the diverse work practices used by their employers to survey and control women’s bodies and bodily labour and how women responded. Within this discussion, I will look at how power differences between employers and women in Saudi Arabian home workplaces constrained women’s capacity to resist and challenge. In particular, the focus will be on exploring women’s strategies to limit and contain the acts of violence in their home workplaces, here, referred to as ‘absorption’. Women’s accounts show that, given the limited options for negotiating with violence, the sole approach women employed in the home workplace was to endure the violence inflicted upon them. Guided by women’s accounts, I will use the word ‘absorption’ as a form of women’s negotiation. As the data highlights, women’s experiences of violence and violation both show and are embedded in the cultural overlap between Saudi Arabian and Bangladeshi societal values and practices under patriarchy. As such, this discussion advances understandings of feminist migration scholarship on the strategies used to disempower women migrant domestic workers, to render them abject, and how women move towards their goal of economic security. In this study, focused on women’s experiences, I am centrally concerned with how women challenge and resist violent work practices in Saudi Arabian home workplace.