In Chain of Love, a documentary film about Filipina domestic workers in Europe, Belen looks somberly at the camera as she discusses her decision to leave her home and her young son to find work in Europe.[1] She comments, "[I]t is hard here because I left my six-month-old baby behind to look after other children. But I had to do it for everyone, not just for myself. I had to put my feelings aside for them. I gave the love I felt for my own baby to the child here." A wry expression appears on her face as she struggles not to cry, powerfully conveying the affective complexities for transnational migrants seeking financial resources abroad for themselves and often for families left behind. In conjunction with a growing transnational workers' rights movement and scholarly attention to the gender inequities of globalization, recent documentary films such as Chain of Love are contributing to a greater awareness of how poor women of color are faring in contemporary global economies. These films pay particular attention to the social and affective impact of the chain of care, which immigration scholars define as the system of caretaking whereby migrants who leave home to work as domestics in other countries depend on family members or other domestic workers to care for their own families.[2]

Documentary filmmakers seeking to portray the experiences of transnational domestic workers, many of whom face legal vulnerabilities as undocumented migrants, confront a familiar conundrum of whether to foreground women's victimization or their self-empowerment. Although all of the films reviewed here provide insight into the range of domestics' experiences, some more intentionally examine the exploitative work conditions for poor, and often quite young, women. Vulnerabilities resulting from the invisibility of domestic work are compounded for migrants who face language barriers, uncertain legal status, and dependency on employers or other powerbrokers. Contrasting this perspective are films that emphasize workers' fortitude and determination to create a better life despite these challenges. We can best understand these representational strategies as different tactics within a feminist politics of visibility, rather than as ideological differences between the films. Such strategic emphases, however, risk filmic representations that reinscribe western racial narratives about Third World women, as well as reproduce heteronormative logics about gender, mothering, and caregiving practices.

Maid in Lebanon is a particularly effective example of a film that investigates the exploitative and abusive aspects of migrant domestic work.[3] At the outset, the narrative signals the social conditions of transnational mobility by following one woman's journey from rural poverty in Sri Lanka to the affluent streets of urban Beirut. The film then features interviews with employment agencies and domestics who tell of a range of experiences, from supportive employers to stories of sexual and physical abuse. The narrative then expands to address the widespread occurrences of employers' abusive treatment of domestic workers throughout the region. Maid in Lebanon concludes with a call for greater international cooperation between nations to enforce better conditions for domestic workers. Films like Maid in Lebanon serve an important advocacy agenda by exposing these highly exploitative gendered labor practices.[4] Visual and narrative strategies, however, end up uncritically reproducing a neoliberal rescue narrative about Third World women's victimization. For instance, the visual emphasis in Maid in Lebanon on the exoticism and poverty of rural Sri Lanka resonates problematically with the ending image of a young woman optimistically preparing for her trip to the Middle East. This narrative framing suggests that only international intervention will protect these young women from continued abuse and violence. Missing, though, is a broader socio-economic perspective that could contextualize these transnational labor practices as well as workers' own efforts to create better work conditions.

In contrast, Maid in America typifies films that emphasize transnational stories of gender empowerment in the face of separation from loved ones, long working hours, non-citizenship, and complex emotional relationships with employers.[5] The film portrays the work conditions and affective responses of Telma, Judith, and Eva, three Latina domestic workers in Los Angeles. Self-empowerment takes multiple forms, from finding a positive work situation to participating in labor activism. Eva, for instance, is a member of a domestic worker cooperative, one of three in the nation, that holds workshops, teaches computer skills, offers insurance and ensures job stability. She also performs in a play produced by the co-op designed to empower workers to reject abuse by employers.

Beyond workplace empowerment, the film's attention to the emotional lives of Eva, Telma, and Judith poignantly reveals some of the complexities of migrant domestic work. For instance, Eva receives a hug from her elderly employer when she arrives to clean her home. The older white woman's loneliness, which appears mitigated by Eva's generous caretaking, reverberates against a subsequent scene of Eva's sadness at the news of her grandmother's recent death in Mexico. Similarly, at the start of the film, Judith, who is pregnant with her fifth child and lives with her husband in Los Angeles, expresses her anguish at being separated from her other four children. Competing desires to improve their lives and a longing for her absent children results in Judith's decision to leave her husband and return to Guatemala with her infant son. Visual contrasts between her living conditions in LA and the impoverished housing in Guatemala foreground the complex reasonings and excruciating choices immigrant women face. The focus on individual experiences both enriches and limits the insights offered by this fine film. For instance, Telma's close relationship with her employers and their child, even participating in a big family gathering, provides insight into her motivations, resisting a simplistic victim narrative. At the same time, these personal stories do little to expose the structural forces constraining these migrant women's options. This is especially apparent in the context of a comment made by Telma's African American employer that domestic work was a "stepping stone" for his grandmother and other female relatives, and now for her. Despite the film's stated critique of labor inequities and personal hardships, the lack of attention to U.S. immigration politics and neoliberal economic policies reshaping Central American economics leaves this narrative of progress only partially critiqued.

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.

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]