Cosmopolitan Identity and Religious Capital as Resistance: Narratives of Two Indonesian Migrant Workers in the Gulf?

COLLABORATIVE PUBLICATION

Author(s) : Helena Verusha Ali, Setiono Sugiharto, Christine Manara

Journal : English Scholars Beyond Borders (Scopus Q2)

Volume & Number : 12 & 3

Abstract :

Previous scholarship has documented how Indonesian migrant workers are often positioned within racialized and classed labour hierarchies in Gulf countries, where they are frequently stereotyped as low-skilled and suitable primarily for domestic or menial work. In this article, we examine how two Indonesian migrant workers that include a female hotel receptionist in Kuwait and a male street sweeper in Saudi Arabia navigate these inequalities and articulate forms of everyday resistance. Drawing on narrative inquiry, we analyse how participants interpret their experiences of misrecognition, linguistic marginalization, and symbolic violence, and how they mobilize available resources to reassert dignity. Our analysis demonstrates that resistance does not take the form of overt confrontation; rather, it is enacted through subtle, situated practices that reflect both identity negotiation and embodied agency. The white-collar participant maintains a cosmopolitan identity through multilingual competence, aesthetic labour, and professional self-presentation, allowing her to counter the racialized association of Indonesian women with domestic work. The blue-collar participant turns to the inclusiveness of the religious community, drawing on prayer, Qur’anic recitation, and mosque-based belonging to access symbolic equality and moral recognition unavailable in the labour field. Through these narratives, we show how maintaining a cosmopolitan identity and participating in religious community function as culturally grounded strategies of resilience and resistance that enable migrants to navigate the constraints of Gulf migration regimes. By foregrounding how migrants themselves describe their strategies of survival, we demonstrate how maintaining cosmopolitan identity and participating in religious community operate as meaningful forms of symbolic resistance within Gulf labour migration. This article offers a new contribution to sociolinguistics and migration studies by highlighting religious participation as a form of symbolic capital and cosmopolitan self-stylization as a migrant strategy of resistance, expanding existing understandings of agency in contexts often characterized exclusively by vulnerability.

Keywords : Indonesian migrant workers, Gulf labour migration, symbolic resistance, cosmopolitan identity, religious community, narrative inquiry, sociolinguistics, agency 

Link : ESBB 2026 Volume 12, Issue 3 | English Scholars Beyond Borders