Amy Sim
Introduction: Women, Mobilities, Immobilities and Empowerment
The articles in this volume are collated from field studies in East and Southeast Asia on several key aspects of women’s experiences related to work and mobility. They highlight a range of issues based on women’s labor as migrants, whose social or biological, paid or unpaid labor, are structural continuities that characterize the nature of women’s role and status within households and families across cultural systems in East and Southeast Asia. The articles in this volume demonstrate how contemporary developments in work and mobility affect women migrants from developing countries.
 The 21st century has been said to be one that will see the rise and dominance of Asia. To fuel this systemic economic takeoff implies an increase in human flows within and to this region to respond to demographic and economic differentials across the region. Against this backdrop, this volume discusses the role that women in migration play as foreign wives, domestic workers and seasonal rural to urban migrants. It maps some of the issues that they confront in destination countries, as well as in their own homes as absent wives, mothers and daughters in expanded networks of global householding.
 On another level, this volume frames the overseas employment and settlement of women migrants in destination countries, in the contexts of  contestations between States, organized labor exporters and emergent migrant women’s movements, which for migrant women represent their individual and collective strategies for making a ‘bare life’1 (Agamben, 1998:177, 180) liveable. The studies here underscore the potential that migration offers to women in this region, while highlighting the complexities and contradictions in labor supply and its relationship to politics, culture and capital.

Hsiao-Chuan Hsia
Foreign Brides, Multiple Citizenship and the Immigrant Movement in Taiwan
As capitalist globalization intensifies, recent discussion of citizenship has sought to decouple citizenship from its traditionally close association with the nation-state. Scholars have proposed “multicultural citizenship” and “multiple citizenship” as alternative concepts. The former is premised on the idea that the nation-state contains a degree of plurality that allows migrants to retain their cultural identity provided they adhere to the state’s political norms. The latter underscores the need to separate citizenship from limiting cultural identities and loyalties, and argues that multiple citizenship and multicultural citizenship are incompatible.  This paper agrees with the ideal of multiple citizenship and shows how multiculturalism can be co-opted without changing the substantive and formal rights of citizenship for immigrants. However, the author argues that the ideal of multiple citizenship and the concept of multicultural citizenship are not inherently incompatible. Based on the experience of empowering women who migrate to Taiwan through marriage, this paper illustrates how the concept of “multicultural citizenship” can be used as a narrative strategy to challenge Taiwan’s exclusionary model of citizenship, paving the way to move towards the ideal of a more inclusive multiple citizenship.

Amy Sim
Women Versus the State: Organizing Resistance and Contesting Exploitation in Indonesian Labor Migration to Hong Kong
This article examines the role of the state and the private sector in temporary labor migration and the responses of migrant workers to resist oppressive practices in labor export from the sending country. More precisely, it explores state-backed practices in the creation of debt bondage among Indonesian migrant women and state responses to developments in the Indonesian women’s labor movement in Hong Kong.
 Indonesian women migrant workers in Hong Kong had begun to organize collectively from 2000 and this study of women’s activism in labor migration interrogates their grounded notions and practices that underlie women’s empowerment. While ideas and definitions of women’s empowerment vary widely and attempts to empower women do not always bring about the desired effects of transforming disempowering structures, this article will attempt to show why certain modes of empowerment lead to structural transformations while others are less promising for women. This article serves as documentation of a historical phenomenon in women’s labor migration and concludes with some of the principles that engender women’s empowerment as social and collective qualities.

Maria Rosario Piquero-Ballescas
Global Householding and Care Networks: Filipino Women in Japan
Women's movement away from their own home has been described as migration and the reason for their migration often labeled as economic. Despite testimonies that point to emotion, particularly care and concern for the members of their households as the primary reason for their decision to move, women's move beyond their homes is still considered as basically economic, and still confined within the conventional rubric of migration studies, rather than viewed as expanded householding.
 Analyzing past and recent data collated since the 1990s up to the present, this paper follows the trail of care and householding from the homes of origin of women from the Philippines to Japan to show the importance of care and emotion for understanding human movements, to further analyze the link between domestic and global care and householding, and to further explore the interrelationship of globalization, the international division of care, and householding.

Bernadette P. Resurreccion
Female Migration and Social Reproduction in the Mekong Region

Studies on female labor migration in the Mekong Region tend to focus on their lives in host societies, especially the exploitative working conditions in their new workplaces and unfair migration policies. In contrast, this article exa-mines female migrants as they maintain and reconfigure their obligations of care and social reproduction in their households of origin from a distance. Three micro-level cases of migrant women in Myanmar, Vietnam, and Thai-land demonstrate that women deploy a range of resources to negotiate alternative care arrangements at home during their absence, without disrupting established gender norms and the requirements of social reproduction.

Catharina P. Williams and Amrih Widodo
Circulation, Encounters and Transformation: Indonesian Female Migrants
This paper explores the ways in which notions of gender, space and propriety are drawn upon by female migrants in performing their gender identities in new spaces of their migration to Hong Kong.  It scrutinizes the narratives of women’s circulation and encounters in the process of migration. The paper draws on post-structuralist approaches to reveal the ways in which the female migrants position themselves in the changing spaces of migration. We uncover diversity among the women in the study in performing their gender identities. Yet the women reveal similar shifting subjectivities in negotiating their positions in changing local relations. Circulation and encounters that make up transnational migration are seen as multiple facets, intersecting and impacting on subject and space. Employing an ethnographic approach, the research explores the reworking of migrants’ relations and practices through changing gender identities and subjectivities. The transformation of the migrants in this study is evident in their multiple and diverse expressions of shifting subjectivities.

Manolo Abella and Geoffrey Ducanes
The Effect of the Global Economic Crisis on Asian Migrant Workers and Governments' Responses
The Effect of the Global Economic Crisis on Asian Migrant Workers and Governments' Responses. Volume 18 (1), p. 143-159, 2009.