UCLA

Dreams of the bounties born by distant lands are both fabled and fact, immanence and transcendence. Such fantastical imaginings can coax an individual toward an audacious life decision, and it is this enticing entelechy that lies at the core of this study. This project examines how the tangible possibility for a ‘better’ life articulates with the ascendence of female domestic labor migration from Ethiopia to the Arab States of the Persian Gulf. I explore how powerful desires of becoming a sovereign caretaker reveal the ethical projects undertaken by women in contemporary Ethiopia. In asking how such desires and failed aspirations for the good life map on to the psycho-affective realm, my work situates experiences of mental and emotional unwellness as a place of social and psychic mediation—that is, episodes of “sickness” reflect the precarious globalized processes of human labor exchange between regions of the Global South. I consider individual women’s narratives regarding their migration journeys, domestic work, and corresponding “sickness” as distinctive modalities of desire.I maintain that the mental illness and associated treatment discourses surrounding returned Ethiopian domestic workers are unique to a distinct social, cultural, and economic, ordering of contemporary Ethiopia. I argue that such broad generalizations based on western notions of classification flatten the lived reality of mental and emotional unwellness particular to migrant domestic workers. By valuing individually narrativized experiences of mental and emotional unwellness, my work reveals that “mental illness” is instead described by my interlocutors as “sickness,” and is specifically tied to experiences of ambivalent and ambiguous self-understanding and self-formation. By untangling the ambiguities and individual subjectivities present in the diagnosis and personal experiences of mental and emotional unwellness, this study illuminates how individual women recognize and sense what causes, constitutes, and cures a “sick” self. This project gives particular attention to the structures of social relationships, highlighting how individual and national precarity is embodied and prescribed at the individual and societal level of the female body. In my adherence to feminist theory, I advance the notion that their migration is a form of quiet revolution, and their “sickness” follows experiences of unanticipated oppression. This impoverished subjectivity follows new and unfamiliar encounters with forms of subjugation and domination perpetuated by their employers. I, therefore, consider “sickness” as a mode of expressing unwellness in relation to micro and macro forms of domination in articulation with desire and a unique form of self-confident understanding. In questioning why and how this particular group of women develop and express these forms of unwellness, and why psychiatric-based care providers interpret and treat these women’s subjective expressions as mental illness, this research makes visible the realities of complex mental and emotional unwellness. In a broad sense, this examination of individual and intersubjective understandings of unwell returned Ethiopian domestic workers likewise offers an anthropological evaluation of the relationship between mental and emotional unwellness and migration, in relation to growing power imbalances and human rights issues operating within Ethiopia and between Ethiopia and the Arab States of the Persian Gulf.