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‘It’s Just a Matter of Key Performance Indicators’: The Disposability of Foreign National Women Sentenced to Death for Drug Trafficking in Malaysia
Abstract
Drawing on research on foreign national women sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Malaysia, this chapter speaks to the issue of bodily lived experience as an organising conceptual tool for theorising the global contours of gendered punishment. Here, it is argued that those female drug couriers are viewed as ‘disposable’ by drug syndicates and Malaysian law enforcement alike—a concept that has been critically explored by postcolonial feminist scholars. Crucially, their disposability is embodied: many of the women were caught with drugs on their body or had swallowed capsules of drugs and it is thought that they make better drug couriers as they are believed to be less suspicious to authorities by virtue of the way they perform their gender. Overall, it is argued that the disposability of these foreign national women can be explained by a continuum of patriarchal state violence.
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Within international discourse, female motivations for crime have received relatively little attention when compared to male offenders. Feminist contributions have shed light on this underresearched area with the majority of studies being conducted in the developed world. Using a sample of inmates convicted for drug smuggling on the island of Barbados, this article seeks to provide culturally specific data on the subject. Using a qualitative methodology, the study finds that in keeping with feminist research in the field, the motivations of the women were dominated by various forms of victimization that accounted for their present incarceration.
This article analyzes how Central American immigrants in tenuous legal statuses experience current immigration laws. Based on ethnographic observations and over 200 interviews conducted between 1998 and 2010 with immigrants in Los Angeles and Phoenix and individuals in sending communities, this study reveals how the convergence and implementation of immigration and criminal law constitute forms of violence. Drawing on theories of structural and symbolic violence, the authors use the analytic category "legal violence" to capture the normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of the law. The analysis focuses on three central and interrelated areas of immigrants' lives-work, family, and school-to expose how the criminalization of immigrants at the federal, state, and local levels is not only exclusionary but also generates violent effects for individual immigrants and their families, affecting everyday lives and long-term incorporation processes.
Critics of law's many claims to power over women identify 'wars' on 'drugs' as a terrain of women's oppression. Domestic skirmishes in the drug 'wars' in countries of the North have facilitated intensified surveillance of women as they birth and raise their children or claim support from public institutions; justified intrusion into the 'private' spaces of women's bodies, their homes, and their places of leisure; and increased the criminalization of women. In the countries of the South that have borne the brunt of the globalization of American prohibition laws – places where the 'war' is literal, not metaphorical – women have been displaced by armed conflict and had their livelihoods destroyed by crop eradication programs.
Situated at the intersections of the North and the South are the women from poor countries and the poor women from rich countries who work as couriers, carrying small quantities of prohibited drugs from source and transit states into those in which consumers reside. In many states, including Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, convicted couriers normally receive very harsh sentences, usually multi-year prison terms. This sentencing practice has fuelled concerns about the imprisonment rates of black women from socially, politically, and economically marginalized communities. Some studies indicate that black women receive prison sentences for importing drugs at rates greatly disproportionate to their populations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada and that drug-importation offences contribute significantly to the over-representation of black women in prisons.
The conventional view that severe punishment of couriers is necessary to achieve deterrence and protect society has encountered resistance from some sentencing judges in a few jurisdictions. They have criticized guidelines that produce harsh penalties, sought to modify these norms, and sometimes refused to invoke them. A recent Ontario sentencing decision offers what at first sight seems to be a fundamental break with established practice, both in its relatively light penalty and, more importantly, in its justification of the sentence. In R. v. Hamilton, the judge imposed conditional sentences on two black women couriers who had entered Canada after swallowing condoms stuffed with cocaine. Hill J.'s opinion characterizes importing by couriers as a distinctive offence deserving of mitigation because of the social context – the racialized identities, impoverished circumstances, and parenting responsibilities – of the women who commit it. His construction of black women couriers as trapped by their circumstances, 'desperate' for money and 'vulnerable' to exploitation by drug-trade organizers, draws on developments in feminist analysis and 'critical race theory' that have promoted social contextualization as a way to address discrimination. Without relinquishing the notion that courts must hold couriers accountable for their crimes, Hill J. seeks to temper the penal consequences of the offences, mitigating sentence on the basis that these women neither chose nor controlled the social context that drove them to commit their offences. This usage of social-context analysis did not persuade the appeal court, which treated the women's social context as marking them as precisely the kinds of persons that severe punishment seeks to deter and, hence, as a reason to impose harsh penalties.
Despite their different holdings on the relevance of social context to determining the penalty, the two decisions share common themes that have the effect of buttressing discriminatory as well as punitive practices of the criminal-justice system. First, they rest on similar understandings of how the social context of poor black women accounts for a disproportionate number of them appearing before the courts as drug couriers. Both opinions treat 'social context' as pertinent to the women's choices but not to those of officials. Neither imagines the possibility that the identities and circumstances of black women might cause them to be targeted when enforcement agents decide whom to watch, stop, and search. Second, both opinions reproduce the misleading portrayals of the dangers of drugs that have marked sentencing discourse since the state first criminalized intoxicants. This demonization of prohibited substances lays the foundation for portraying any importer of such substances as a menace to society, no matter how small...
Although women still comprise a small percentage of the total prison population in countries in North America, Western Europe, and Latin America, their numbers have been rising in the past two decades. This article is a literature review of a new and dynamic field of scholarship that maintains that this increase is a byproduct of three interrelated factors: the war on drugs, globalization, and prison building. First, using international pressure, the United States has imposed its federalized and militarized drug war on the governments of other nations. Second, the transfer of U.S.-led neoliberal economic policies, fueled by globalization, has marginalized poor women of color in modern and developing nations. As a result, many of these women have become involved in criminalized behaviors, including drug trafficking, as a means of economic survival. In this post-September 11 environment, transborder crossings are closely monitored, increasing the likelihood of arrest. Third, in an effort to contain surplus populations created by economic restructuring the United States has promoted a social policy of mass incarceration. The union of these three factors results in the greater likelihood of the arrest, detainment, prosecution, and imprisonment of poor women of color. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the experiences of women in global prisons and recommends strategies to curtail women’s imprisonment.
In this article, I draw upon interviews with 30 Nepali returned women migrant workers to elucidate how the gendered institutional logics of both the Nepali state and for-profit manpower companies synergistically function to constrain women’s mobility. In particular, I focus on women migrant workers who migrate illegally to Gulf countries to work as domestic laborers, as this constitutes one of the largest channels of women’s labor migration from Nepal. To illuminate the particulars of Nepali women migrant workers’ experiences, I employ two theoretical frameworks, both developed by feminist political economists within the context of feminized workplaces broadly and global factory floors specifically. The first framework presents a logic of female disposability as shaping the feminized workforce of the global South. The second framework presents a logic of gendered control as doing the same. In this article, I show how these dual logics can be applied to women’s foreign labor migration in Nepal, and argue that these logics operate simultaneously through the various institutions that Nepali women navigate during migration. The Nepali case shows how both logics serve ultimately to limit women’s mobility and bolster the authority of institutions and organizations historically controlled by men—for example, the family, the state, transnational corporations—over women migrants. By bringing these two logics to bear on a case of women domestic workers’ migration from the global South, this article offers new insights into the functioning of institutions central to this large-scale, transnational movement of people.
As a small labor-short city-state with over 100,000 migrant domestic workers mainly from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka and amounting to one foreign maid to every eight households, Singapore provides a case study of a country where foreign maids are seen as an economic necessity but not without important social consequences and political ramifications. Beginning with a brief examination of state policy on transnational labor migration relating to female domestic workers, this article goes on to explore the debates within public discourse as well as private accounts on the impact of foreign maids on a range of issues, including female participation in the workforce; the social reproduction of everyday life including the delegation of the domestic burden and the upbringing of the young; the presence of “enclaves” of foreign nationals in public space; and bilateral relations between host and sending countries. It concludes that the transnational labor migration is a multifaceted phenomenon with important repercussions on all spheres of life, hence requiring dynamic policy intervention on the part of the authorities concerned.
Everyday, around the world, women who work in the Third World factories of global firms face the idea that they are disposable. Melissa W. Wright explains how this notion proliferates, both within and beyond factory walls, through the telling of a simple story: the myth of the disposable Third World woman. This myth explains how young women workers around the world eventually turn into living forms of waste. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism follows this myth inside the global factories and surrounding cities in northern Mexico and in southern China, illustrating the crucial role the tale plays in maintaining not just the constant flow of global capital, but the present regime of transnational capitalism. The author also investigates how women challenge the story and its meaning for workers in global firms. These innovative responses illustrate how a politics for confronting global capitalism must include the many creative ways that working people resist its dehumanizing effects.
New edition of Aihwa Ong's classic ethnographic study of Malay women factory workers. In the two decades since its original publication, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline has become an ethnographic classic in the fields of anthropology, labor studies, and gender and globalization studies. Based on anthropological field work in an agricultural district in Selangor, Peninsular Malaysia, Spirits of Resistance captures a moment of profound transformation, illustrated by the disruptions, conflicts, and ambivalences in the lives of Malay women during the rapid industrialization associated with Malaysia's rise as a tiger economy. Aihwa Ong's nuanced approach to the Malay women factory workers' experiences of the contradictions of modern globalized capitalism has inspired subsequent generations of feminist ethnographers in their explorations of key questions of power, resistance, femininities, religious community, and social change. With a new critical introduction by anthropologist Carla Freeman, this new edition of Spirits of Resistance continues to offer an exemplary model of sophisticated analysis of culturally based resistance to the ideology, surveillance, and institutional authority of globalized corporate capitalism.
The role of borders in managing sex work is a valuable site for analysing the relationship between criminal justice and migration administration functions. For the purposes of this article, we are concerned with how generalized concerns around trafficking manifest in specific interactions between immigration officials and women travellers. To this end, this article contributes to a greater understanding of the micro-politics of border control and the various contradictions at work in the everyday performance of the border. It uses an intersectional analysis of the decision making of immigration officers at the border to understand how social differences become conflated with risk, how different social locations amplify what is read as risky sexuality and how sexuality is constructed in migration. What the interviews in our research have demonstrated is that, while the border is a poor site for identifying cases of trafficking into the sex industry, it is a site of significant social sorting where various intersections of intelligence-led profiling and everyday stereotyping of women, sex work and vulnerability play out. © 2013 © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
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The research presented in this article combines an analysis of the political economy of export processing production systems with critical attention to the discursive formations of racialized women's bodies in the context of maquiladoras on the US–Mexican border. Drawing on anti-racist feminisms, transnational feminisms and feminist political economy theories, the article challenges academic discourses that either victimize or neglect to thoroughly understand the social reproduction of working class women from the global South. In so doing, this research aims to dismantle the portrayal of Third World women primarily as victims of exploitation. This article first joins the lineage of feminist scholarship that deconstructs the victimizing discourse of racialized women's bodies in the labour market and then proceeds to discuss the various ways women workers in maquiladoras have resisted exploitation and opposed the myth of their disposability. This article bridges conversations amongst feminist political economy, transnational feminisms and anti-racist feminisms, as these fields have lacked engagement with each other's works.
This article explores how the US ‘war on drugs’ depends on certain notions of femininity and womanhood. In particular, I examine how female drug couriers from the Americas are constructed at US border sites of international airports in the 1990s. I find that female drug couriers are described in terms of victims and vamps – a take off of the madonna/whore dichotomy. The victim and vamp discourses, I argue, are the performative enactments of a security state that operates according to a racialized logic of masculinist protection. I hold in tension the circulation of the victim/vamp discourses with the story of Paula, a Colombian woman who was caught trafficking heroin in hidden compartments of her suitcase. I use Paula's story to call attention to the political work in dismissing women as agents in the international drug trade.
This article uses the arrest and conviction of Australian Schapelle Corby (for smuggling drugs into Indonesia) to articulate and explore the mediation of criminal `events' across borders, bodies and technologies. As such, connections are drawn to the resurgence of nationalistic and neocolonial discourses within the contexts of globalization and the `war on terror'. Working at the intersections of gender, race, border control and national identity, the Corby phenomenon is taken as a political drama of visuality and nationality that equates bodily security with regional integrity. Thus this article necessarily tracks the persistence of the body of the white female as a unit of currency in the aggressive adherence to historical tropes of nationalism. The mediation of Schapelle's `criminal' body is shown to deploy a corporeal lexicon of terror through which the celebrity prisoner articulates tensions and changes in bilateral relations with Indonesia.
This paper offers a first attempt at discussing the linkages between migration and development in reference to the feminisation of intra-regional migratory flows in Asia. It begins with a summary of the current debate on the ‘migration and development nexus’ with two objectives in mind: 1) to assess this debate's relevance to intra-regional migration in Asia; and 2) to redirect attention to the social dimension of feminised migrations and its relationship to development. In doing so, the focus is on the individual and family level to discuss the impact of migration on personal development as well as on interpersonal relations. What follows thereafter is a brief summary of the character and context of feminised migration in Asia, by approaching this issue from an intra-regional (that is migratory moves of Asians within Asia) perspective. The final section links the previous discussion to the issue of rights. The article concludes that the conceptual and normative linkages between women's social and economic rights as they relate to migration need further exploration, eg by way of specific case studies or ethnographic research. This is needed for relevant policy reform and implementation.
The emphasis on structural adjustment and labor flexibility in both developing and industrialized economies is rapidly altering the nature of employment. Women are being substituted for men and many forms of work are being converted into the kinds of jobs traditionally geared to women. International data on recent trends in female economic activity reveal that new types of labor data are needed to highlight the mechanisms of control over workers and the actual economic forms of vulnerability to which women are exposed. The paper concludes by posing questions that challenge the traditional concerns of donors and policy makers in many developing countries.
The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italyâs most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it. In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucaultâs fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotleâs notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over âlifeâ is implicit. The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmittâs idea of the sovereignâs status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificedâa paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective ânaked lifeâ of all individuals.
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