Foreign Maids and Beauty Queens

Abstract

Every Sunday is ‘maids’ day off’ in Hong Kong, when Filipina domestic workers gather en masse in the city’s Central District. These public gatherings have become a well-known phenomenon in Hong Kong, with thousands of migrant women occupying the financial district from morning till sundown, sprawling out in front of high-end boutiques and building makeshift temporary houses from cardboard boxes. The weekly event is at the centre of social life for migrant workers and has given rise to a wide range of amateur performance practice, including choreographed dances, street catwalks and beauty pageants. For Hong Kong residents, however, such leisure activities contradict the rationale for tolerating the presence of foreign maids, whose labour is needed but needed out of sight. The excess of Filipinas performing out in the open is a highly visible transgression for a Hong Kong public that would prefer these undesirable bodies to remain invisible.In the context of Hong Kong’s exclusionary politics of labour migration, the amateur performances of Filipina domestic workers are a cultural and a site-specific practice of diasporic identity that create a public presence for an otherwise invisible migrant workforce. As amateur performers, every Sunday Filipinas counter their common experiences of servitude and contest racialized conceptions of Filipina identity as naturally inclined towards domestic work. The amateur labour that such performances entail offers a different experience of work and time for Filipinas, producing distinct embodied ways of doing politics that claim a place outside the domestic realm. These cultural practices invite us to consider the stakes of amateur performance under conditions of duress and prompt us to examine the link between amateur performance and domestic work as particular forms of labour affected by relations of value production.