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East Malaysia's vibrant nightlife is a lucrative industry employing many Filipina migrants. The paper addresses the impact on Filipinas of discursive regimes of work, the state and family. These are derived from national discourses of ethnicity, class and nation intertwined with dominant discourses of womanhood in both Malaysia and the Philippines. The paper argues that in transnational space disciplinary regimes are heavily constraining, but resistance and negotiation are possible. The paper follows a feminist poststructuralist approach, which finds that disciplinary forces, rather than being coercive, are subtly inculcated in the migrant subject. Embodiment is never absolute and everyday actions of women initiate instability in the category 'Woman'. This offers the opportunity for agency. Ethnographic methods are used to explore the tensions and constraints of the Filipinas' everyday experience of migration. In the setting of a largely non-Muslim East Malaysia, ethnic identity seems differently constructed than in a predominantly Muslim Peninsula Malaysia. Through friendship and marriage with Malaysians, and integration into local communities, Filipinas are able to resist and negotiate their migrant status. The actions of Filipinas and their local Malaysian partners contest conservative notions of ethnicity, gender, class and nation in both the Philippines and Malaysia. This offers a potential for agency for Filipinas, the possibility for which could also extend to the largely non-Muslim local Malaysians with whom they share their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Synopsis: From the 1960s Sabah accepted refugees who fled Mindanao after the war escalated against insurgent Muslim groups. From the 1970s, labour migration to Sabah increased exponentially as Filipinos attempted to escape the structural poverty of their country by ameliorating Malaysia''s labour shortage in construction, oil palm and service industries. Various tensions developed in Sabah between migrants, and local communities and the state. Migrant Muslim women in particular experienced violence on a number of different fronts: oppression at the level of citizenship, institutions and culture produced physical, economic and social violence which differentiated their lives from those of both Malaysian citizens and Filipinos in the Philippines. The article addresses, through life narratives, the parameters of such violence and women''s resilience, invoking questions of who ought to defend and protect the rights of migrant Muslim women. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]