20 Introduction
the importance of reconciliation with the self as the first step towards the
reconciliation with the other, who decry the sectarian politics of the past
and undergo “public rituals of catharsis.” His account ends with a caution
to not take the apparent emergent public consensus for granted, given the
fact of the continuing sectarian distribution of power and thus the neces-
sity of “reading between the lines” in a public sphere “unusually rife with
coded signals, masks and voices in play.”
oors, Jureidini, őzbay and Sabban explore a very different topic, M
that of migrant domestic workers in three localities (Dubai, Istanbul and
Beirut), but equally question how the private and the public, the domestic
and the national are to be distinguished. Examining how domestic work-
ers, who are meant to be invisible and encapsulated within the domes-
tic and the private, actually achieve “being present in the public” raises
interesting questions: on the one hand, it points to the gendered access to
public space operating in many of these settings that apply to all women
whether “migrant” or “national”; on the other hand, it also illustrates how
the invisible existence of migrant women in the home enables the par-
ticipation of “national” women in the construction of a national public
sphere. Finally, domestic workers are made public by becoming objects
of, if not participants in, popular culture through soap operas, novels and
movies as well as in public and media debates on human rights, immigra-
tion laws, national identity and the meanings of motherhood.
e importance of mobility is emphasized in this chapter as well as Th
the “politics of presence,” the sheer act of being visible outside the domes-
tic space as a communicative device in the public sphere. The authors find
that understanding present-day migrant domestic labor necessitates a his-
torical perspective and an understanding of the various types of shifts in
domestic labor from slavery to wage labor to the current situation, which
can be seen as a return to slave or bonded labor. This history of labor
in the domestic sphere shows that it cannot unambiguously be seen as a
private sphere. Since the private/domestic space is actually the workplace
for the domestic worker, she has to access privacy by going into public
space. Public spaces, on the other hand, are being “privatized” or at least
challenged in their claims to “openness” through the creation of subaltern
public spaces (such as church groups, restaurants or NGOs) particular to
such groups who not only have no legitimate claim to a public presence,