Silence as an Ethical Agency: How Syrian Refugee Domestic Workers Reconstitute Themselves as Ethical Subjects

This paper examines how forcibly displaced individuals constitute themselves as workers, particularly in stigmatized work. It explores how Syrian refugee women protect their honour and dignity while performing domestic work that carries a stigma. This study analyses silence as a form of agency that enables individuals to constitute themselves as ethical subjects. Based on ethnographic research conducted among Syrian refugee domestic workers in Istanbul, I argue that silence, as a modality of agency, enables Syrian women to maintain a sense of honour and personhood. Through a post-structuralist lens offered by Saba Mahmood, I explore how silence, as a practice, creates desires, intentions, emotions, and thus corresponding inward dispositions. Specifically, I identify two forms of silence – silence as secrecy and silence as renaming – that enable women to protect their past selves and resist becoming domestic workers. This conceptualization of silence differs from previous views that regard silence as a sign of passivity or enforced silence. I propose alternative ways of thinking about agency, emphasizing its relationship to embodied capacities and subject formation, and highlighting the complex interplay between the self, bodily behaviour and senses, others, structures of authority, and power.