Moving ahead through confinement: Ugandan women working in the Middle East

Abstract

ABSTRACT
Women’s labour migration from Uganda to the Middle East has surged in recent decades, becoming a subject of concern and intense debate within Uganda. Women who have worked in the Middle East tell of slavery, humiliation and confinement – and they tell of relations forged in the Arab families they work for and about becoming somebody, in the eyes of people back home. They tell of cruel bosses – together with whom they work on creating ‘happiness’ on social media. They tell of happiness as sites of ambivalence and confusion, of heroic escapes – and desperate attempts to get back to the Middle East to try one’s luck once more. We cannot reduce their experience to binaries of constraint vs. agency; necessity vs. choice; slavery vs. freedom. We suggest exploring their contradictory and ambivalent stories by focusing on motivations, desires, and goals that defy simplistic categories of subordination and resistance.