Abstract EN:

My doctoral thesis focuses on the work, relationships, subjectivities and struggles of migrant women required to perform domestic labour for private employers in Beirut (Lebanon). The research participants are part of an international immigration program which operates under the Sponsorship System (niẓām al-kafāla) and produces unfree labor, as many other temporary immigration programs that tie domestic workers residency to a specific household, thus limiting both their movement in the labor market and their mobility in space. Part of my research was conducted among Lebanese and expatriate employers in Lebanon, as well as public and private social actors that shape this labour immigration program. It aims at shedding light on the “respectable” legitimization of such a system, which relies on the “whore stigma” attributed to these workers who run away from their employers’ households. Migrant women’s contacts, solidarity networks and formal collectives appear to be major resources in the face of domination within the household, state repression against "fugitive" workers, as well as other forms of subjection organized both transnationally and locally. The research participants’ collective “work of survival” shows how (unfree) reproductive work is diverted towards migrant communities and reinvented within these networks. Through their practices, the research participants acquire agency and are able to rework their subjective experiences. In this regard, “survival” does not refer to subsistence only: it describes the collective effort by which, under unbearable conditions, subjects band together to « make a life for themselves » in the full sense of the term, a life from which a number of research participants claimed to be excluded. Finally, my research contributes to a constructivist and critical approach to social psychology, through the practice of feminist ethnography and action-research.