Wendy Kozol,
"Filming the Care Chain: A Review Essay"
(page 2 of 3)
In contrast to conventionally structured documentaries,
Lakshmi
and Me utilizes an autobiographical frame that turns a
self-reflexive gaze onto the employer and filmmaker,
Nishtha Jain.[6]
A year-long film process results in a depiction of Lakshmi, Jain's
employee, as a woman with complex family relations, sexual desires, and
a class-conscious critique of labor practices, as well as
disappointments, anger, and frustration at her situation. In one scene
Lakshmi participates in a festival ritual, and Jain comments, "It doesn't seem
like this is my Lakshmi." Ownership and otherness seep out of her
statement even as the filmmaker recognizes her subjectivity.
Saturated colors of the festival's clothes, dancing, music, and a
ritualistic tongue piercing further distance Lakshmi from her employer
and presumably the audience who only shares Jain's point of view.
Self-reflexivity is a promising means to address class, race and/or
caste differences between women. However, the narrow focus on personal
stories in this film, like other autobiographical documentaries on
domestics, results in an uncritical depiction of Jain's benevolence when
she comes to the aid of Lakshmi during a health crisis. Similarly,
Home, or Maids in My Family, points an uncompromising gaze at the
filmmaker's Moroccan family's class privilege.[7]
Offering a particularly incisive portrait of her mother's biases, the filmmaker
unfortunately does not examine the political economy that could push
self-reflexivity beyond personal accountability and/or self-critique.
Documentary films on domestic work typically address the grinding
poverty that necessitates that women work arduously long hours for
little pay. Chain of Love, however, stands out for its systematic
discussion of the structural factors that produce poverty and motivate
women's transnational migration patterns.[8]
Against a visual backdrop
of extreme poverty, the film interviews researchers who discuss the
devastating economic impact of neoliberal policies, such as debt
restructuring in the 1980s. These scholars address the benefits of
transnational domestic labor, for both sending and receiving nations, to
provide a socio-economic context for the chain of
care.[9]
Scenes of intimate caregiving with employers' children visually
underscore the domestics' comments about their affection for these
children as well as the hardships and self-sacrifice resulting from long
absences from their own families. While wiping away some tears, Melanie
says, "You have to be strong with your family so far away. You have to
cope by yourself. I'm not angry and I don't regret it. I'm better off
like this. I'm not angry because everything I do is for our benefit. I
decide myself whether I take the good path or the bad path. It's up to
me." As caregiving passes down the chain, domestics hire even more
impoverished women to care for their own children. Michelle, a domestic
in the Philippines, tenderly cares for Melanie's child while using
similar terms to describe the painful experience of loving a child who
she has been hired to raise. Chain of Love effectively ruptures
the stereotypical representation of Third World women's victim status
through these varied rhetorical and visual strategies.
Uninterrogated in this film, however, as in the others discussed so
far, are the heteronormative assumptions underlying the sociological
framework of the chain of care. Such assumptions perpetuate the
invisibility of other types of caregiving and the multiple participants
in transnational care chains. As Martin Manalasan argues, "The glue
that keeps this chain together in a linear fashion is the
heterosexualized bodies of both First and Third World women while the
fuel for the global dispersal of migratory domestic labor is normative
maternal love. Therefore, the chain of care framework foregrounds the
pathos of dislocated biological
motherhood."[10] In privileging
biologically female caregivers and heteronormative families, these films
typically do not represent non-gender-normative domestic workers, or the
care given by fathers, extended family members, same-sex parents, and
others.
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