Moral Agency under Legal Precarity: Islamic Ethical Resilience among Indonesian Muslim Women Migrant Workers in Taiwan

Abstrak

Indonesian Muslim women constitute a major segment of the migrant domestic workforce in Taiwan, where secular labor regulations offer limited accommodation for workers’ moral and religious needs. Moving beyond dominant accounts that frame migrant women primarily as legally vulnerable subjects, this study examines how Indonesian Muslim women migrant workers actively negotiate Islamic ethical commitments—particularly marital fidelity—as forms of everyday moral agency under conditions of legal and social precarity. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with six Indonesian Muslim women employed in Taiwan, the study employs an integrated analytical framework combining emotional geography and systemic functional linguistic transitivity analysis. This approach enables a detailed examination of how moral agency is spatially enacted across domestic, workplace, public, and digital environments, and how agency, responsibility, and self-discipline are linguistically constructed in participants’ narratives. The findings demonstrate that participants engage in diverse strategies, including spatial avoidance, religious dress practices, peer-based moral regulation, ritualized religious observance, and digital religious engagement. These practices function not as passive adherence to religious norms but as active, situationally negotiated forms of ethical resilience. The study’s primary contribution lies in conceptualizing Islamic ethical practice as a form of lived legal consciousness that operates alongside—and at times compensates for—the limitations of state law in transnational labor regimes. By foregrounding moral agency rather than victimhood, this study advances socio-legal debates on migrant precarity and offers a novel framework for understanding religion as an agentive resource within migration governance. Practically, it underscores the need for culturally and religiously responsive mechanisms in migrant protection policies beyond state-centric legal interventions.