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Martin F. Manalansan IV,
"Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm"
(page 5 of 5)
As feminist scholars and researchers, we need to think of the chain
of care not as a set of discreet relationships between worlds and bodies
strung up in a teleological manner, but rather as a series of
conflicting and diverse bonds between labor, emotions and corporeality
that do not line up neatly in terms of gender binaries and normative
familial arrangements. The film and the anthropological works I
mentioned above offer unorthodox yet productive narratives and
experiences that boldly suggest the messy and contradictory
relationships between ideal conditions and everyday practices in
transnational and diasporic gender relations. Researchers of gender and
migration will benefit from disrupting their normative conceptions of
domesticity, love and care by not locking these concepts to static
gendered bodies with immutable affective skills. We need an analytical
and empirical openness to the possibilities of migration, gender and
emotion that will enable a more expansive and effective politicization
of global domestic workers by refusing to render their affective status
as "natural" and inevitable.
Endnotes
1. Among such works include but not limited to:
Pei-Chia Lan, Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich
Employers in Taiwan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Rhacel
Parrenas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic
Work. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Nicole
Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina
Workers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997. [Return to text]
2. Katharine Donato , Donna Gabbacia, Jennifer
Holdaway, Martin Manalansan and Patricia Pessar, "Gender and Migration
Revisited," International Migration Review, 40:1. [Return to text]
3. Sarah J. Mahler and Patricia R. Pessar,
"Gender Matters: Ethnographers Bring Gender to the Periphery Toward the
Core of Migration Studies." International Migration Review 40:1:
27-63. [Return to text]
4. Pierrette Hodagneu-Sotelo, "Introduction:
Gender and Contemporary U.S. Immigration" American Behavioral
Scientist 42:2: 565-576. [Return to text]
5. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild,
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy.
New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003. [Return to text]
6. Arlie Russell Hochschild, "Love and Gold," In
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy.
Eds. B. Ehrenreich and A. Hochschild. New York: Metropolitan Books,
2003, 29. [Return to text]
7. Jennifer Hirsch, A Courtship after Marriage:
Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003. Denise Brennan, What's Love Got
to Do with It?: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican
Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Nicole Constable,
Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and "Mail
Order" Brides. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Mark
Padilla, Caribbean Pleasure Industry: Tourism, Sexuality and AIDS in
the Dominican Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
[Return to text]
8. Despite their astute observations, I think that
Antonio Negri and Michael unwittingly align the "domestic" with the
female and feminine. See Negri, "Value and Affect," boundary 2,
26:2 77-88, as well as Michael Hardt, "Affective Labor," boundary
2, 26:2: 89-100. [Return to text]
9. See Michel Foucault, "Volume 3: Care of the
Self," History of Sexuality. New York: Random House, 1988. [Return to text]
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