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- Mack, Jennifer
(author)
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Inhabiting the Imaginary : "Factory Women" at Home on Batam Island, Indonesia
- 2004
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In: Singapore journal of tropical geography. - : Wiley. - 0129-7619 .- 1467-9493. ; 25:2, s. 156-179
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Batam Island, Indonesia, located a short ferry ride away from Singapore, is a place where tourism and industry have been developed simultaneously and a border area where “developed” and “developing” nations meet. Government officials, investing international corporations and the “factory women” who work in the island's industrial estates arrive in Batam - native to none of them - with their own preconceptions and goals. When challenges not foreseen through master planning arise, the authorities cling ever more tightly to their physical and structural development model: the nearby city-state of Singapore. Conversely, the factory workers who travel intranationally to work in this export processing zone (EPZ) find their objectives contested in the face of the Master Plan, corporate agendas and ethnic fusions characterising this transnational capitalist space.Entering into the homes of three groups of women migrants living and working in Batam, the relationship between the private realm that they inhabit and the social contexts in which they participate publicly is investigated. Some of the choices that women make at and about home are identified, and their ability to “micro-resist” these external structures is explored. At home, the dynamic relationship between the Batam development project and the women's own hopes and visions of the place - sometimes parallel and sometimes incongruous - are revealed. As they experience life on Batam, their “social imaginaries” of it are shaped into various new realities, and their homes, removed from the confines of the factory floor, thus become spaces of release from these tensions.
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