ABSTRACT
There are about 200,000 migrant women domestic workers – the majority from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and the Philippines – in Lebanon, which has a population of about 4 million. Although the Philippine government officially banned citizens from coming to Lebanon following the July War in 2006, an estimated 40,000 Filipinos, mostly female domestic workers, still live and work in Lebanon. Since 1975, migrant women have gradually replaced Lebanese and other Arab women from poor backgrounds, who once made up the dominant domestic labor force (Jureidini 2009). In recent years, the human rights situation of domestic workers has been of public interest due to widespread media coverage of the abuse of these women, as this appears to have led to several suicides. However, the mechanisms of power behind these abuses are often overlooked, as are the complex ways in which Filipina women negotiate within these power structures in order to shape their lives in Lebanon.
