Reproductive Labor at the Intersection of Three Intimate Industries:

Domestic Work, Sex Tourism, and Adoption

by

Dr. Nicole Constable

12:15 – 1:15pm, 23 Jan 2016

Dr. Constable is currently JY Pillay Global-Asia Professor of Social Sciences at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include transnational migration and mobilities; the commodification of intimacy; gender, sexuality and reproductive labor; ethnographic writing and power.

Her geographical interests span Hong Kong, China, the Philippines and Indonesia. She has conducted fieldwork in Hong Kong on constructions of Hakka Chinese Christian identity, on resistance and discipline among Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers, and among migrant mothers. Her recent publications focused on cross-border marriages, migrant worker activism, undocumented workers, and new transnational family formations.

Her latest book is Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor (University of California Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2014), about Filipina and Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong who become mothers, and the legal and personal struggles they face regarding migrant work, intimate relationships, and parenthood.