The Remittance Heroines’: Feminist Theologies of Resistance in the Global Labor Market

Scholarship on female migrant workers and their predicaments has not addressed the many forms of spiritual resistance among them. The available literature has focused on the practical strategies of resistance (i.e. networking, gossiping, self-naming, counter-narratives) without interrogating the more personal aspects of that resistance, namely the dimension of faith. In other words, previous research has been secular and mostly disregards a potent site of resistance: personal theologies.

To address this gap in our understanding of feminist resistance, my study aims to address three key research questions. First, how do feminist theologies (Islamic and Christian) look when seen from the perspectives of Indonesian female migrant workers? Second, what kind of feminist theological thoughts can be distilled from the precarious contexts in which Indonesian female migrant workers live? And third, what role do these theological narratives play in the constitution of the daily resistance of Indonesian female migrant workers against violence?