Mobilizing Piety: Gendered Morality and Indonesian–Saudi Transnational Migration

This paper focuses on the emotional discourses invoked in efforts to frame and control Indonesian women's labor migration to Saudi Arabia. Based on interviews with migrant recruiters, state officials, and migrants in West Java, as well as data collected by migrant rights activists, the paper examines the emotional vocabularies and imagined geographies of gendered piety that are deployed in attempts to mobilize, direct, and discipline women's transnational labor migration. It explores articulations of women's virtue as a key dimension of the moral geographies of Indonesian women's overseas migration. More broadly, it suggests that such attention to struggles over the regulation of emotion can serve as a lens onto the ways in which gender articulates with the religiously‐inflected transnational labor market linking Indonesia with Saudi Arabia. Keywords: gendertransnational migrationIslamIndonesiaSaudi Arabia Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Deirdre McKay for the substantial contribution she has made in helping to improve this paper. Many thanks also to the Fulbright New Century Scholars (NCS) Program for funding much of the work reflected here, and to conversations with many NCS colleagues whose ideas have influenced this paper. The fieldwork was supported by the National Science Foundation BCS‐0422976, and the author is grateful for that support. All deficiencies remain the author's own responsibility.