Voting from the margins: transnational political participation and gendered labour of indonesian migrant domestic workers in Kuala lumpur and Hong Kong

Despite legal equality in voting rights, public discourse persistently reinscribes migrant women’s political engagement through the idiom of “deficit,” casting their participation as lacking, insufficient, or anomalously disengaged. This paper focuses on a precarious community, migrant women employed in private domestic work in Asian countries, and examines their participation in elections in their home country, Indonesia. Drawing on 40 in-depth interviews conducted in Indonesian with migrant women in Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong, we demonstrate that migrant women, many of whom come from rural areas are indeed politically mobilised. They vote, canvass for candidates, volunteer on election-monitoring committees, and engage in political campaigning on social media. Others make conscious decisions not to participate or are prevented from doing so by various constraints. To shed new light on how migrant women exercise political agency under precarious circumstances, we develop a new typology of transnational political participation: Resilience, Rebound, Remoteness, and Resistance. Furthermore, we argue that the employment conditions prevailing within private household domestic service impose material constraints that significantly limit—and at times actively preclude—migrant women’s ability to participate politically. Finally, by centering the relationship between emigrants and their homeland, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of transnational political participation within South–South migration corridors and advances broader discussions of migrant women’s political agency.