The Asian Migrant’s Body: Emotion, Gender and Sexuality

The Asian Migrant’s Body: Emotion, Gender and Sexuality brings together papers that investigate the way Asian migrants experience, think about, perceive and utilize their bodies as part of the journeys they have embarked on. In exploring how bodies are physically and symbolically marked by migration experiences, this edited volume seeks to move beyond the immediate effects of hard labour and (potentially) exploitative or abusive situations. It shows that migrants are not only on the receiving end where it concerns their bodies, nor are their bodies only utilized for their work as migrants: they also seek control over their bodies and to make them part of strategies to express themselves. The collective papers in The Asian Migrant’s Body argue that the body itself is a primary site for understanding how migrants reflect on and experience their migration trajectories.

Michiel Baas holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Amsterdam. He is currently an Associate Fellow of the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and lecturer with the University of Amsterdam. He has conducted extensive research in the field of migration and transnationalism, particularly focusing on mobility between India, Singapore and Australia. More recent work also focuses on new middleclass professionals in urban India such, a topic which he studies through the lens of social and cultural mobility.