ABSTRACT
In Asia, the massive but uneven impact of change wrought by globalization processes has meant that even as people resist or inflect creeping as well as sweeping change, lives and livelihoods are being transformed. Nowhere has the changing role of women been more evident than in the globalizing cities of Asia. These are cities that have become threaded into the intersecting spaces between globalizing time-space compression on the one hand, and the particularities of localisms on the other. In the post-colonial era when many nation-states in Asia gained independence, cities grew rapidly, largely as a result of the increased volume and quickened pace of transnational and rural-urban migration. At the same time, the place of women in the city has become even more visible in the last two decades, as migration within Asia grew in both volume and velocity, becoming more feminized, irregular and commercialized (Collins et al. 2013; UNDESA 2012). Even as they continue to shore up the home front with their unpaid domestic labour, women — citizens and increasingly migrants — play an expanding role in paid domestic work, the factory, the corporation and the city.
