Reading care work as a borderland in My Cleaner, Muz Sesleri and Lullaby

Abstract

In this article, I compare the literary representations of women care workers in Maggie Gee's My Cleaner, Ece Temelkuran's Muz Sesleri and Leïla Slimani's Lullaby through the concept of borderlands which, especially since Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, has come to represent a space surpassing geographical borders in ways to bring attention to crossroads of challenging yet promising encounters of personal, cultural and political spaces. I also argue that when feminism and literature meet in a comparative frame, they might have the potential to facilitate a space to contextualize women's lives and understand similarities and differences among women within a non-hegemonic frame. I thus propose that a comparative analysis of the literary representations of women care workers in these novels denotes such a fruitful crossroads where relationality can be discussed as a nuanced concept affording space to discuss the complexity of women's experiences and enhance the frame of feminist solidarity.