|
|
|
REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
| Pei-Chia Lan, Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Durham: Duke University Press 2006)
|
| THIS CAREFULLY RESEARCHED and clearly executed ethnographic piece is about transgression and making boundaries in an era of international migration. Using ethnographic data, the author pursues a theoretical thread of transgression and boundary-making to weave together a geopolitical map featuring Filipino and Indonesian migrant domestics, Taiwanese middle-class professionals, immigration brokers, and the source and host states. At the macro level, Lan illustrates how national boundaries are drawn and enforced, by both source and host countries, in the midst of international migration. As she demonstrates, at the micro level, Taiwanese middle- class women professionals who contract domestic labour out to migrant domestic workers not only have to carefully map out gendered boundaries in their homes, they also make deliberate efforts to redefine culturally regulated meanings of femininity and domesticity. The domestic workers, who used to be housewives in the Philippines and Indonesia, are now maids making a living with their domestic skills in a foreign land. Therefore, they too are venturing into new territories of transgression and boundary-making. International migration is thus an institutional undertaking that constitutes and re-inscribes social boundaries along class, gender, racial/ethnic, and national lines locally and internationally. |
1
|
|
The author applies the metaphor of "global Cinderellas" to migrant domestic workers and their paradoxical experiences abroad and at home. Going from being housewives to maids supporting themselves, married Filipino and Indonesian women seek employment abroad to escape unpaid housework at home, explore the outside world, and achieve financial independence. As migrants, they leave their impoverished homeland for financial betterment, imagined modernity, and temporary freedom. Once abroad, these migrant domestic workers celebrate their conception of a Cinderella-like life on their Sunday outings. They see their sleeveless shirts, tight jeans, dancing, and mingling with friends as the fulfillment of a liberated life style unavailable in their homeland. This sense of a liberated self is nevertheless limited, the author argues, because they spend the rest of the week confined to the homes of their employers. Moreover, they are racially characterized by those employers and politically marginalized in the host country. Furthermore, although they are trusted as surrogate family and fictive kin by their Taiwanese employers, delicately but clearly defined spatial and cultural boundaries are drawn in everyday encounters to ensure that they remain at a distance and thus alienated. The tale of their migration journey is filled with simultaneous financial emancipation in their homeland and inevitable oppression in the home of their employer as well as the achievement of a liberated, albeit curtailed, gendered self in the host country. |
2
|
|
On the other side of the divide is the Taiwanese middle-class, female employer whose professional status makes it a challenge for her to dutifully carry out the conventional "second shift." These women hire migrant domestic workers as live-in nannies and substitute daughters-in-law. Such an arrangement requires them to carefully carve out spatial boundaries in their homes to accommodate the migrant domestic workers. Simultaneously, they ascribe new meanings to the culturally regulated notions of domesticity and womanhood, so as to preserve their status as "the lady of the house." Racialized cultural boundaries are drawn deliberately to ensure that the maid will not contaminate their children or disturb their private family life. Migrant domestic workers therefore carry out only the physical aspect of reproductive labour. The labour defined by the culture as emotional and feminized remains in the hands of the Taiwanese employers, allowing the latter to assume a professional career in the public sphere while their sense of femininity in the domestic sphere remains intact. Separating the physical from the emotional and cultural aspects of reproductive labour, however, requires daily micro-management. The bad name the employer acquires for being demanding and difficult to please, the author argues, should be seen as a result of the politics of transgression and boundary making. When they hire migrant domestic workers, Taiwanese professional women not only need to assume new responsibilities to manage the maid in her private life; they have to constantly deal with the anxiety that ensues from the possibility that their femininity and womanhood will be challenged. |
3
|
|
Considering the analysis from a comparative perspective, limited progress has been made in challenging patriarchal orders in the domestic sphere among Taiwan's financially well-off new generation. Although Taiwanese professional women have made successful in-roads into the public sphere, like their North American counterparts they are faced with subtle and not-so-subtle resistance when it comes to changing the unequal gendered division of labour in the domestic sphere. Instead of pressing their husbands to take part in reproductive labour, an easier alternative is to contract out part of their womanly duties to migrant domestic workers. They draw upon their financial resources, hard-won from the public sphere, to elevate their position in their otherwise losing battle in the domestic quarter. One cannot but wonder whether labour force participation in the public sphere opens up space for change, transformation, and liberation in the private sphere, or whether it simply means that patriarchy mutates into new forms of hierarchy and oppression with the migrant maids taking on the most strenuous work. |
4
|
|
This is a fine and challenging ethnographic project, where the researcher dives into the social fabric of boundary making and transgression among diverse groups. The author covers stories from both the middle-class employers and their employees, the migrant domestic workers. Rich narratives and ethnographic data across the employer/employee divide allow the author to examine the dynamics of employment relationships. They make it possible for the author to present stories from both sides of the power divide. For example, stories of someone having their husband stolen by the maid are often cited by female employers. The maids, on the other hand, portray their female bosses as demanding, jealous, and paranoid. To accomplish such a delicate task as an ethnographer, the author herself engages in transgression and boundarymaking. While her personal middle-class background gives her research capital to access those newly rich employers, her research bond with the maids invites such questions as, "Why do you want to hang out with them?" Her affiliation with the maids is no less problematic. The researcher finds much comfort when her migrant domestic informants proudly display her as their "Taiwanese friend who speaks good English." Such acceptance and ethnographic "passing" are utterly unstable and subject to rupture. In the eyes of her foreign domestic informants, she is unquestionably "one of them" when it comes to politics of affiliation and categorization. |
5
|
|
The book is a theoretically informed, sophisticated analysis of employment relationships in the era of transnational migration. Scholars in women's studies, racial/ethnic relations, labour studies, and international migration and globalization will find this book insightful and informative. It is clearly written, rich in ethnographic insights, and accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students in social sciences and Asian studies. Its tales from the field constitute a useful addition for novice ethnographers who will have to grapple with reflexivity and juxtaposition of position and locality in ethnographic inquiry. |
6
|
| | |
PING-CHUN HSIUNG
University of Toronto |
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|