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.1 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.2 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.3 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.4
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.”5 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.
- Laksmi and Me, Dir. Nishtha Jain. Raintree Films, 2008. [↩]
- Home, or Maids in My Family, Dir. Yto Barrada. Icarus Films, 2001. [↩]
- 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.” [↩]
- See also Parreñas, Servants of Globalization. [↩]
- Martin F. Manalasan IV, “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm,” S&F Online 6.3 (Summer 2008). [↩]
