Abstract
Migrant workers and immigrants coming from south-eastern Asia has become the fifth biggest ethnic group of Taiwan. Yet, Taiwanese people often depend on news report to come up with their ideas toward them if they don’t have a chance to interact with them. However, the mass media tends to report negative news, causing the representations of migrant workers either pitiful or hateful. In the past, researchers mainly discuss such topic from the economic, managing, and sociological point of view. Studies about how the media represent migrant workers seldom choose fictional films as texts for analysis. They seldom analyze these texts with spatial theories either. Thus, this thesis chooses Lin’s “We Don’t Have A Future Together,” Wen’s “Rasa,” and Ho’s “Pinoy Sunday” for analysis, uses Third-Space theory and aims to find out how these directors use all kinds of spaces to construct a more subjective image for migrant workers and how these images are different from the representations created by the mass media. The three films discussed in this thesis include workers from different countries, of both genders, and in different industries. Three directors each adopt unique cinematic style and strategy to emphasize that migrant workers have agency. Lin sets up the migrant worker to meet a local worker, comparing their spatial practices inside and outside the employer’s house and making migrant worker’s appearance in Taiwanese religious space possible. Lin creates a subject that can look, with linguistic and cultural capital, and dealing relationships reasonably. Wen uses boundary work at home to reveal domestic workers’ agency. Some choose to stay different from Taiwanese, refusing to be part of a Taiwanese family while others try to pursue cross-nation marriage. The latter turns employer’s house into a restaurant selling cuisines from south-eastern Asia. During the process, the subjectivity of migrant workers can be seen. In addition, it challenges the stereotypical representations on foreign brides. Ho shows male migrant workers’ agency through their imagination of homeland projected on the city, the walk and the gaze taking place while wandering in the city. When moving outside ethnic places, they achieve the effect of anti-discipline for they don’t follow city planners’ intention. The gaze in the journey also making them subjects. Their observation of the making of news is the director’s reflection on how mass media often represent migrant workers in a bad way. The migrant workers not only demonstrate their subjectivity through all kinds of spatial practices, the scenes that have third-space features also point out that these workers possess the power to blur boundaries such as the boundaries between public and private sectors. The directors use varied spaces to picture migrant workers with subjectivity and agency, making film different from other media and making Multiculturalism or Multi-ethnic discourse in Taiwan more that a slogan.