Refti Handini Listyani, F. X. Sri Sadewo, Irwan Abdullah, Mirna Yusuf
Sexuality among Indonesian migrant domestic workers has largely been framed through vulnerability-centred paradigms that emphasise exploitation, moral regulation, and labour precarity, often positioning women's bodies as sites of injury rather than negotiated meaning. This article argues that Global South domestic labour regimes expose the geographical limits of dominant postfeminist models of sexual agency, which are grounded in visibility, consumer autonomy, and neoliberal self-fashioning within Western media cultures. Drawing on Teun A. van Dijk's critical discourse analysis of nine YouTube testimonies by Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, the study examines how sexual subjectivity is discursively reconstructed through refusal, boundary-making, strategic distancing, and reflexive reinterpretation of pleasure. These narratives show that agency does not operate as unrestrained choice but as negotiation embedded in labour conditions, moral scrutiny, and employer-dependent hierarchies. By positioning Indonesia as an analytical vantage point, the article demonstrates that visibility-centred postfeminist frameworks do not fully account for migration regimes structured by contractual dependency and moral governance and advances a recalibrated account of sexual agency within feminist media studies. © 2026 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Department of Sociology, Universitas Negeri Surabaya, Surabaya, Indonesia; Department of Anthropology, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; Department of Social Development and Welfare, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
