Theodora LAM, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Brenda YEOH, National University of Singapore, Singapore
On-going travel restrictions and curtailments brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have greatly affected transnational familial relations and the ways in which members of transnational households are able to “create and retain ‘a sense of collective welfare and unity’ across borders (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002). The limited and controlled physical as well as virtual mobilities of migrants and their left-behind families may have caused them all sorts of distress affecting their physical, economic and emotional well-being. While low-waged female migrant domestic workers have long been accustomed to the restrictive ways in which they can perform transnational mothering, the pandemic has generated both new opportunities and challenges in conducting mothering from afar. In this vein, this paper explores the lives of Filipino and Indonesian female migrant domestic workers in Singapore aimed at understand their strategies for continuing transnational mothering during the pandemic. It explores both the precarities and opportunities generated for them during the pandemic and investigates how they navigate and negotiate transnational acts of motherhood in a period where border closures mandate their continued physical (and perhaps even virtual) absence from their left-behind families. The paper also scrutinises how migrant mothers may use the pandemic to mend or exacerbate existing cracks in their transnational households.
Mots clés : pandemic|transnational mothering|left-behind families|female migrant domestic worker|Singapore
A104732TL