Shelters and clinics: sites where care and violence are mutually constitutive for migrant workers in Singapore

Abstract

This paper critically interrogates care and violence, demonstrating how they are both spatialised and mutually constitutive within the shelters and clinics of Singapore for migrant workers. While there are seemingly disconnected sites, both clinics and shelters are utilized to provide different forms of care, discursively represented as spaces of protection and healing. Drawing on ethnographic research with migrant domestic workers at these sites, this paper will, however, argue that shelters and clinics are also spaces where violence is enacted and experienced. Indeed, despite having lived through different forms of violence in their employers’ homes, this paper will reveal how domestic workers were subjected to further suffering and bodily harm; all while, paradoxically, receiving different forms of care. Building on social and cultural geographic debates, and particularly on feminist scholarship that foregrounds care, violence, and the body, this paper will argue that care and violence are mutually constitutive in these sites. Moreover, it will show that the migratory regime in Singapore creates spaces where the care that is practiced cannot be abstracted from violence. Beyond coexisting, in these geographies care and violence are shown to be inextricably connected.