Wendy Kozol,
"Filming the Care Chain: A Review Essay"
(page 3 of 3)
Paper Dolls, a documentary film by Tomer Heymann, stands out
in this regard.[11]
This film, about Filipino gay and MtF transgender
caregivers in Tel Aviv who form a drag performance group called Paper
Dolls, features scenes of caregiving that display these queer domestics'
compassion for their elderly Jewish employers. Sally, for instance,
travels to the Philippines to visit her ill mother but returns to care
for Haim, her elderly employer. At his death, she weeps at a distance
from the gravesite and from the other funeral mourners. Her isolation
visually articulates the intensity of her feelings as well as the social
distancing experienced by many migrant workers. Paper Dolls
juxtaposes this emphasis on caregivers' affective investments in their
work with an extended representation of their queer lives apart from
that work. Scenes of their interpersonal relationships, pre-performance
preparations, and performance excerpts, coupled with examples of
harassment on the street and police security crackdowns, convey the
Filipina/os pleasures and aspirations as well as the social and legal
constraints threatening their livelihoods and even their lives.
In addition, the film highlights the gay
male-identified filmmaker's developing friendship with the Paper Dolls.
The narrative moves from Heymann's initial transphobic reactions, to his
queer friends shaving his face, applying make-up and dressing him in
women's clothing, to close-ups of his grief in the departure lounge of
the airport at the end of the film. Heymann's unarticulated desires,
like the performances and off-stage living spaces, provide in-depth
depictions of migrant domestics that not only challenge the
heteronormative assumptions underpinning most discussions of domestic
work but also situate caregiving within a richer frame of workers' lived
experiences.
Filmic negotiations around the politics of visibility have resulted
in a range of informative and compelling documentaries about domestic
workers. Nuanced representations that balance agency and victimization,
as in Chain of Love, Lakshmi and Me, and Paper
Dolls, provide alternatives to Eurocentric rescue narratives by
considering the desires, hopes, and pleasures, as well as struggles and
humiliations, in the daily lives of domestics. Like debates about sex
work, however, all these films, except Chain of Love and Paper
Dolls, leave uninterrogated commonplace assumptions about the
degrading nature of domestic work. Both of these films specifically
discuss the pride caregivers take in their work as well as the
neoliberal logics that position this as a devalued form of labor. Given
the pedagogical value of these films, filmmakers need to continue to
negotiate this complex representational terrain in order to make visible
both the ideological and structural forces that maintain domestic work
as a poorly paid and undervalued racial, gendered, class-based and
increasingly transnational labor practice.
Endnotes
1. Chain of Love. Dir. Marije Meerman.
First Run/Icarus Films, 2001. [Return to text]
2. See for example: Nicole Constable, Maid to
Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1997); Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild, eds.,
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000); and Rhacel Parreñas, Servants
of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2001). [Return to text]
3. Maid in Lebanon. Dir. Carol Mansour.
Forward Productions, 2005. You can access the film online through
EngageMedia.
[Return to text]
4. For another fine example of films in this
group, see: Young and Invisible: African Domestic Workers in
Yemen, Dir. Arda Nederveen, 2007. Human rights organizations like
Eye to Eye with Child Labour (working with Save the Children-UK) have
produced numerous
videos
featuring child domestic workers and the problems of trafficking.
NGO-sponsored advocacy documentaries, however, are not considered in
this review as they constitute an institutional practice different from
independent filmmakers and thus merit a separate analysis.
[Return to text]
5. Maid in America, Dir. Anayansi Prado.
Impacto Films, 2004. [Return to text]
6. Laksmi and Me, Dir. Nishtha Jain.
Raintree Films, 2008. [Return to text]
7. Home, or Maids in My Family, Dir. Yto
Barrada. Icarus Films, 2001. [Return to text]
8. See Robyn
Rodriguez, "Domestic
Debates: Constructions of Gendered Migration from the
Philippines," S&F Online 6.3 (Summer 2008). Rodriguez
criticizes, "the paucity of [sociological] scholarship examining the
gendered consequences of migration for the societies that women leave
behind." [Return to text]
9. See also Parreñas, Servants of
Globalization. [Return to text]
10. Martin F. Manalasan IV,
"Queering
the Chain of Care Paradigm," S&F Online 6.3 (Summer 2008).
[Return to text]
11. Paper Dolls, Dir. Tomer Heymann.
Strand Releasing, 2006. [Return to text]
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