Singaporean female employers subject their Filipina domestic workers to strict rules governing their dress and behaviour, in the name of de-sexualising them and maintaining their status as invisible servants at the employers’ beck and call. This paper suggests that the fashionable attire that Filipina domestic workers don for their day off is also a symbol of rebellion and a rejection of their em-ployers’ desires to render them plain and unattractive. In this sense, fashion is more than just a coping strategy: it is a way of expressing a sexual self, a beautiful and feminine self that is not allowed to be exhibited during workdays. Although these fashion makeovers only last less than 24 hours, in their leisure time Filipina domestic workers transgress the weekday restrictions of their employers while marking their own personal self-transformation as ultra-modern, independent women with consumer power and cosmopolitan tastes. © International Quarterly for Asian Studies.

This article examines the temporalities of citizenship – how the meanings and significance of citizenship change with time – through the cases of Malaysian-Chinese skilled migrants in Singapore and returnees to Malaysia. Drawing from the narratives of five respondents, this paper focuses on how the subjective, emotional, and rational understandings they ascribe to their citizenship(s) shift and change with time during their stays in Singapore or after their return to Malaysia. This article concludes by arguing that citizenship needs to be theorized and contextualized to time by simultaneously paying attention to firstly, the individual life course, and secondly, citizenship constitutions at the national scale.

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Domestic work and the embodied emotional labour it entails have been widely documented in the literature (see for example: ParrenÞas 2000, 2001a; Anderson 2000; Huang and Yeoh 2007). Women as domestic workers were noted as integral to not only nurturing the emotional well-being of their own family of origin, but also in the households of their employers, where they are often considered to become ‘one of the family’ (ParrenÞas 2001a: 364). As Lan (2003: 536) noted, this notion of ‘familial belonging’ for domestic workers contributes to the idea that their work represents a ‘labour of love’. Reproductive labour, with which domestic workers are so intricately involved, is not only a form of corporeal labour but also invested with emotion as they care for children and/or the elderly prepare family meals and pack school bags 9 Anderson 2000). Domestic workers , who are almost invariably women, must also negotiate their own often complex sets of emotions as they often leave family and communities behind, situate themselkves within a foreign household in every sense of the word) while attempting to forge a livelihood for themselves. In addition, women also have to negotiate the degraded social status that domestic work often entails (Parrenas 2000) as a 3D (dirty, difficult and dangerous) occupation.

Why do so few live-in migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Singapore utilize their weekly rest-day entitlement? Using data drawn from 3,886 online profiles of prospective MDWs and 40 interview sessions with MDWs, employers, and manpower agencies, we demonstrate how the industry encourages a logic of submission around rest-days. Through processual analysis, we unearth multiple, repeated moments of capitulation at key moments in a MDW’s work-life: (1) their interactions with a recruitment agency while still in their home country; (2) their matching with an overseas employer; (3) the duration of their two-year contract; and (4) the time of contract renewal. Submission to less frequent rest-days can secure their employability and financial mobility but also further individuates the MDW within the employer’s household and may lead to the engraining of a habitus of submissiveness towards their employers that can open the door to workers’ exploitation. We demonstrate how nationality and work experience further inflect this logic of submission to motivate non-Filipina and inexperienced MDWs to request even fewer rest-days than their counterparts. By combining feminist migration scholarship on Asian MDWs, with a sociology of law analysis, we offer up an example of how the same act of submission can simultaneously embody both resistance and victimhood depending upon the temporal and spatial scale used, and varying interpretations of the rest-day benefit as a much-needed respite, a monetizable benefit, or a signaling mechanism.