Moors, Jureidini, Özbay, Sabban 151Migrant Domestic Workers: A New Public
Presence in the Middle East?
Annelies Moors, Ray Jureidini,
Ferhunde Özbay and Rima Sabban
A discussion of migrant domestic labor brings together three develop-
ments that have hitherto remained largely unconnected in academic
debate: the rapid growth of paid domestic labor, the feminization of trans-
national migration, and the development of new public spheres.^1 In the
last decades of the twentieth century paid domestic labor has become
a growth sector in many areas of the world; the number of migrants
employed as domestic workers has increased even faster. As the large
majority of these migrant domestic workers are women, we have seen the
feminization of international migration. Not only in Europe and North
America, but also in East Asia and the Middle East, growing economic
inequalities on a global scale, shifts in family relations and household
composition, and changing patterns and evaluations of women’s employ-
ment and unpaid domestic work have drawn migrant women into this
field of employment.
s chapter investigates one particular effect of the rapid increase Thi
of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East: their presence in the
public.^2 We start by sketching the context and preconditions for their
public presence in three localities, Dubai, Istanbul, and Beirut. These
sites were selected because of differences in their historical trajectories
of paid domestic labor, their processes of state formation and patterns of
transnational migration. We then briefly revisit conventional notions of
“the public,” highlighting the variety of modes of “being present in the