Female Refugee Work Ethics: Construction of Honourable Syrian Refugee Cleaners in Turkey

This article explores the honourable subject formation of women who fled Syria and became refugees in Turkey. This feminist ethnography of Syrian female refugee domestic workers in Istanbul asks: how do female refugees overcome the double stigma of cleaning work and constitute themselves as honourable cleaners? Most before their exile had been housewives but now have to find paid work to support their families in Turkey. For many, the only employment available is cleaning work, but it is a doubly stigmatised work in Syrian tradition. Using feminist poststructuralist theory and the works of anthropologists Saba Mahmood and Judith Butler, I illustrate how these women, who initially refused to perform stigmatized work and construct a cleaner identity, come to find honour in their job and therefore enact a female refugee work ethics. Through practices of recognition— God's recognition of 'halal work' and the sisterly employment relationships with employers—they find ways to construct new work practices shaped by their culture and religion. In introducing a theory of the female refugee work ethics and the self as a sister worker, this study (1) advances the sparse literature on how Syrian refugee women re-establish a sense of self after forced migration; (2) introduces religious and cultural practices of recognition to stigma and dirty work literature; (3) adds to scholarship on the linguistic agency of Muslim female refugee workers in non-Western contexts, contributing to the decolonization of knowledge.