“Migration and Domestic Work” a book that Dr. Gaye Yılmaz has been working on for four years was presented at an exclusive launch event at Day-Mer.
With female migrants dominating low paid and ever-expanding domestic work worldwide, this book brings together the voices of 120 migrating women of 28 national identities and 10 different religious affiliations. Together they tell how patriarchal and religious gender codes in the family and at work shape their new lives in London, Berlin and Istanbul.
Through their own accounts, the study explores the intersecting multiple and gendered identities women carry from their home countries and how these are reshaped, challenged, changed, or not, as they encounter different structures, traditions and cultural codes in their new countries. With women’s propensity for collective organising, whether via community, social movements or trade unions as a central theme, the authors also bring together issues of migration, work and identity with trade union and community organizing. Migration and Domestic Work is an important source for scholars and practitioners in each of these fields.
Saying that the hardest part in her research took place in Istanbul, Dr. Yilmaz stated that there had been a range of difficulties cropped up whilst interviewing women who left Armenia and came Turkey to find jobs illegally. Stating that a majority of these women remain staying in Turkey after their visas expire, although the visa itself wouldn’t give them a work permit, the women live their lives in fear of being exposed to the police and there they live in hiding in order not to face illegal life prosecutions.
Dr Yılmaz, also spread good news on the possibility of the book’s upcoming English version.
