“But We Can Always Get More!” Deportability, the State and Gendered Migration in the United Arab Emirates

This paper focuses on the politics of states and inter-state relations, and their role in creating environments of deportability and expendability that structure trafficking-like situations for female migrant workers engaged in the sphere of intimate labor 1 in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). States have played a major part in structuring the politics of deportability, a very real, present force affecting experiences of forced labor in Dubai, as well as in painting their citizens as disposable. In this paper, I draw on four years of ethnographic research with female migrants and state officials from both sending countries as well as the US and UAE, to examine the individual and larger macro social factors structuring intimate labor and migrants' rights.