At first glance, many of these “domestic” situations are not the recognizable and stereotypical “feminine” variety that showcase the circulation of global love and compassion. One transgender care worker named Sally develops a familial and intimate relationship with her client. When asked if her client now considered her as a son, Sally said that she felt like a daughter to him. In several scenes, the old man teaches Sally how to read poetry in Hebrew. While he admits that he does not understand Sally’s “gender situation,” he nevertheless gives her a skirt as a gift. Such moments of intimacy and caring illustrate that the messy conjunctions of gender and care work do not clearly follow normative lines.
At the same time, Sally’s situation seems to be the exception to the rule. Many people I have talked to after viewing the film remarked on how the gay Filipino care workers accomplished their work tasks with a kind of cold efficiency. Jan, one of the Filipino care providers, goes about his daily routines with an efficient though less intimate manner than Sally. Many viewers have remarked how Jan seemed to be less invested in his work since he does not seem to “love” his job. It is only when he dresses up in drag in the dimly lit corridors of his client’s apartment that he “comes alive.” Viewers asserted that most of the care workers in the film were like Jan, just going through the paces and enlivening while in the drag performances. In many cases, viewers asserted that these gay domestic laborers, unlike Sally, did not really “care” and that the work was less about emotion and more about sweating it out in a mechanical fashion.
Does this mean that these gay men and transgendered women are devoid of “feelings”? Are these care workers inauthentic because as biological men they are not “equipped” to fulfill the “natural” womanly role of caring? Or is it more accurate to say that their feelings are less grounded in normative domesticity and filial attachments?
I would argue that the film viewers I talked to are not the only ones who seem to suggest the inadequacy of non-normative female (non-mothers, single, transgendered, or mothers without “maternal instincts”) and male subjects in this context. I submit that Ehrenreich and Hochschild in Global Woman (as well as scholars such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri who wrote about affective labor1) have calcified and naturalized the link between female domesticity and care work. Finally, I suggest that Global Woman, and other works, unwittingly echo the universalization of “woman” espoused by an earlier wave or strand of feminism that has long been critiqued. However, this time, it is a universality inscribed onto the Third World woman’s brown body.
I strongly believe that we need to expand our idea of “care work.” The Paper Doll queers are indeed performing care labor beyond the routine of feeding, washing and moving their infirm clients. In their drag shows, I would argue, they are performing a “care of the self”2 as Foucault terms it. In “care of the self,” Foucault argues for the ways in which the subject “cultivates” or more appropriately “labors” to constitute a sense of self through quotidian activities. This process of self-cultivation is in many ways disciplined and constrained, while at the same time it is also a space where the subject may feel a sense of exuberant freedom. It is this self that is presented to a public that scrutinizes, rewards or punishes accordingly, so subjects often have to mediate, veil or dissimulate these glimpses of selfhood. Also, part of this process of self-making involves the search for pleasure. This goes back to Jan and the other “non-caring Paper Dolls” who, within their everyday miseries and struggles, are able to establish mostly fleeting, yet oftentimes fulfilling forms of sociality (with each other and with various audiences) and moments of pleasure. These forms of sociality are in fact imbued with affective energies that at once “authentic” and dissimulated. Members of the Paper Dolls troupe find pleasure in dressing up and performing in front of audiences, and they also find pleasure and solace in being together as a group. In other words, through their drag performances and their off-stage activities (including group sleepovers in cramped quarters) members of the Paper Dolls troupe unravel the false binary of true/authentic and fake/dissimulated feelings.
- 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. [↩]
- See Michel Foucault, “Volume 3: Care of the Self,” History of Sexuality. New York: Random House, 1988. [↩]
