Looking Forward

I think what this week’s readings speak to, as well as Professor Tadiar’s lecture is the façade of the universal benefits of free market capitalism and globalization. Ehrenreich’s piece speaks to the inequalities of feminism and the hierarchy and exploitation by women towards other women. According to Ehrenreich there is no longer any “purity in our consumption,” for even if we do shed the hierarchy of domestic help and clean our own houses we are still buying products that have been produced at the physical expense of someone else(69). This type of exploitation is simply masked by distance. As Ehrenreich affirms, “sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job (70).

A proposed solution, and this is where I think all of this week’s readings fall short: Moving beyond simply making our lives “visible again" as Ehrenreich suggests as I think that’s somewhat euphemistic. I think what’s really needed is to get back to the basics and simplify our life styles. Like Ehrenreich says “our houses are unmanageable” but beyond that our entire way of being is too large to sustain” (68). Local food, local retailers, truly “fair” global sustainable products, and an active educational and progressive component required of all industry must be implemented. In terms of this notion of hierarchy of women, is it perhaps women that should on the forefront of this change? In other words, from where should this change begin?

But my lingering question is this: in several other classes the notion of population control always comes up. Considering a revised model of simplifying our lifestyles, cutting down on our consumption of resources, negating the wasteful materialistic components of capitalism, even then would there still be enough resources to go around? Should there be population control everywhere to ensure that pragmatically and naturally speaking, everyone will have access to the resources? At what point are we simply overgrown or is this a constructed concept to avoid dealing with the particulars of the currently flawed reality in which we exist? And even if we fashioned a world where all resources were available and plentiful, what would that world look like? This vision, though idealistic and far from being immediately attainable is still worth crafting. I would challenge us to think about that as well.

"The point at The Maids, apparently, is not to clean so much as it is to create the appearance of having been cleaned, not to sanitize but to create a kind of stage setting for family life. And the stage setting Americans seem to prefer is sterile only in the metaphorical sense," says Barbara Ehrenreich. When reading this article, in conjunction with Enloe's Globetrotting Sneaker, I can't help but feel disgusted and terrified by the trajectory of American consumerism/materialism. In a culture where social reproduction is completely devalued, kids' time is spent taking SAT prep classes instead of doing chores and playing with friends, and, as Ehrenreich describes in the quote above, people don't have enough time about things beyond immediate appearance, how are people ever going to slow down, pay attention to what they are consuming, or just scrub their own damn floors?
I was especially struck by Ehrenreich's statement that "the result is a kind of virtual existence, in which the trail of litter that follows you seems to evaporate all by itself...a servant economy breeds callousness and solipsism in the served." She also says later that children growing up in the 'servant economy' suffer a "metaphysical loss, a matter of no longer being centered in your environment," thus perpetuating the social alienation and apathy that arises as a result of a complicated, technological world. I've observed this firsthand a few times in watching really wealthy peers who grew up in such an environment, and some of them have the most disgusting sense of entitlement, as if the world belongs to the individual rather than the individual belonging to the world. I had a close childhood friend with this attitude and upbringing and we eventually just couldn't be friends anymore because she was selfish, careless, out of touch with reality--probably as a result of the 'metaphysical loss' that Ehrenreich mentions. Is this sad phenomenon ever going to change, or will it continue to get worse? Is it possible to make people care more about what they consume? (Or maybe I should start with, how do I make myself care more about what I consume? How can I make myself continually aware that any material pleasure I've ever experienced was possible only because of the pain of an underpaid and undervalued (probably female) worker in some distant place?) Also, who's to blame for the crisis of commodified and devalued domestic work? Surely some would say that feminists are at fault, because they decided that women could do more than just housework, thus supposedly de-valuing domestic labor. Of course, that's not fair, because women can do more than housework but they can do housework too, and so can men and children. Isn't there a happy medium somewhere, where the societal norm is for one to balance his or her work life and personal, domestic life, instead of putting too much emphasis on work and money? (And where everyone is equal and we take of the Earth and hold hands while singing and eat berries and live in the woods...)

Last discussion

In response to Sujean, I find myself wondering why there is no vocal opposition to Sachs within the university. My father is an economist and I grew up with the idea that Sachs's solutions to end poverty were incorrect before I even knew what they were, but I found it hard to reconcile with the way he is received and treated. 

I have the same questions about opposition to the IMF and World Bank. When we talked about Larkin in class, someone mentioned the protests in Seattle of the WTO that effectively shut down the meeting in 1999. Protesters came from many different groups, but they did not form a cohesive whole at the time or afterwards. If there is so much opposition to these groups from so many different people, including at the academic level, why is there no cohesive alternative institutional opposition to these institutions whose actions have enormous consequences? Or do I just not know about it?

I am sorry to report that I have not yet finished all of the reading because I just got into a(very long) disagreement with a woman that I live with about whether or not gender roles were socially constructed. We started out talking about working mothers and fathers versus stay at home parents, and we eventually had to agree to disagree in order to continue to live together. But the readings for this week show the insidious consequences of that decision. Whether or not a woman decides to work or stay at home in the US is in fact not a decision that most women face because they are not in the economic position to do so, and those that do face such a decision do so in the face of economic stability and insurance. But for the women of Enloe's article, these gender roles have devastating consequences. For an employee in a South Korean Reebok factory, it was essential to realize that the company had a vested interested in her remaining docile and passive as part of the organizing process. That it is a socially constructed role is made obvious through their own experience and their ability to organize, but I find it very troubling when potential American consumers buy into company arguments about gender roles. I think it allows for the kind of opportunity rationalizing that Sachs engages in, which is ultimately harmful to the workers themselves. 

Even though I enjoyed reading Ehrenreich's "Maid to Order" the most, I still have trouble deciding how I really feel about what she says. On the one hand, I agree with what she says, everything that she says makes sense; on the other hand, I don't find myself actually believing what she says. It pains me that she seems to vilify women who "outsource the work of the home." 

In Hong Kong, it's almost unusual to hear of a family without a "domestic helper," or "ya-ya"s (Tagalog for 'nanny'); even my ya-ya who worked for my family has a ya-ya for her son. But even though having a ya-ya in Hong Kong is the norm, my family wouldn't employ a help if we didn't really need it, and, truthfully, we do; both my parents leave at 8 in the morning and often don't return until 11 at night and they go on business trips at least twice a month. No one is left to take care of the house or the dog, especially since my sister and I are away at school. 

So naturally, I find issue with Ehrenreich's claim that, "real work... tends to vanish." I couldn't even imagine how offended my parents would be if I ever told them that they weren't doing "real" work!

I also cannot bring myself to sympathize with Ehrenreich, especially when she makes very unfair, accusatory statements like, "a servant economy breeds callousness and solipsism."

So I guess my question is, what are working women supposed to do? What am I supposed to do, if, as the daughter, I should be "filling in" for my mother, but am, instead, away at school---which my mother must work to pay for?!! Also--and maybe I'm missing the entire point of Ehrenreich's article and missing the big picture--but what is so wrong with outsourcing domestic work, when it's not a matter of relegating dirty work, but a matter of not having enough hours in the day? Also, when can the pressure on women to do everything--job, take care of and raise baby, cook, clean--be lifted? It's no wonder why more and more women are hiring other women to do housework. 

First, I want to comment on a passage from Parrena's article. When quoting Joy Manlapit, Parrena writes, "I want to be able to order someone to make me coffee, to serve me food. That is good. That is how you can take back all the hardships you experienced before. That is something you struggled for." How is it that a domestic worker struggles to be the one who forces others into enduring hardships? It is sad that domestic work makes some bitter and aspire to be the employer instead of seek ways to abolish these put downs of what the article Maid to Order states as "lower' kinds of people for a 'lower' kind of work". This leads me to my questions raised from Maid to Order.
When in 3rd grade, we sat in a circle and my teacher asked all of us to say our hobbies....I answered with cleaning, because it was one of my favorite things to do. My teacher just laughed, causing the other students to laugh at me, and said that "cleaning is not a hobby. Isn't there anything else you like to do?". To this day I still enjoy cleaning but I do realize that it isn't a hobby to some people but it is a job; a job that defines what others think of you. pg 70, "Dirt..tends to attach to the people who remove it--'garbagemen' and 'cleaning ladies'".
This article discusses the lack of male partner's help around the house and cleaning while the female works. But for the most part, a female's idea of clean is not that of a males. Would a woman actually be happy living in a house that a male thought of as clean? Wouldn't she feel the need to do more and clean it more, anyway?
Here are some other questions I have from this reading:
Another interesting issue to look at that isn't raised in this article is which person, male or female, pays for the domestic help. Since the woman is free to do work and earn money, does the man see it as she has to pay someone to do "her job"? Or will the male pay so he doesn't have to do his share around the house?
How many women who consider themselves feminists have hired domestic help? If they have, do they because they see it as 'helping' the other women get money for their families? What would their reasoning be?
What about male maids? Do they feel discriminated against? It would be neat to hear some of their stories.
Lastly, I find it interesting how housework is considered as heritable. Pg 61, "And when the person who is cleaned up after is consistently male, while the person who cleans up is consistently female, you have a formula for reproducing male domination from one generation to the next." And Pg 69, "Since most of us learn to clean from our parents (usually our mothers), any diminution of cleaning skills is transmitted from one generation to another, like a gene that can, in the appropriate environment, turn out to be disabling or lethal." Here cleaning and domestic work is seen as genetically and socially constructed. How does any woman, especially migrants and women too poor to migrate, defeat this preconception and rise above it to create a society where one's identity is not defined by her occupation and domestic work is not a woman's duty?

My question is related to the issues that Ehrenreich and Enloe brought up in their articles regarding maid services and the shoe industry, respectively.  What responsibility does the everyday consumer have to these issues?  Tadiar mentioned briefly this idea of a hierarchy of concern and feeling that our society seems to have created [we can care of the six Americans who died in Mumbai (and the Israeli Rabbi + wife), but all the Indians who died/were injured don't even have a face, name, story, and hence, sympathy].  How does this play into these issues of racialized/classcized (made up words, I know) service/labor?  The seems an overwhelming sense of apathy towards these situations -- even though consumers have the power to influence the practices of the businesses, the governmental allowances and relationships, and stances of institutions like the WTO and the World Bank -- is it because of a lack of information?  Or do people really not care?  And how do we make people care?  How do we make this issue more than just another bullet point on the (seemingly) unending list of injustices occurring throughout the world?

American Apparel clothing is all American-made and thus sweatshop free, in addition to being hip and alternative.  It also costs an arm and a leg and doesn't allow it's LA employees to join garment workers' unions.  So the question:  Is "sweatshop-free" unanimous with "humane."  In her essay "Maid to Order," Barbara Ehrenreich touches upon issues addressed in Cynthia Enloe's chapter "The Globetrotting Sneaker," when she states:  "We can try to minimize the pain that goes into feeding, clothing, and otherwise provisioning ourselves--by observing boycotts, checking for a union label, etc.--but there is no way to avoid it altogether without living in the wilderness on berries" (69).  In the case of American Apparel, we "minimize the pain," but is that enough to claim we are making a difference?  How and where do we draw the line?

To build off of Gabriella's question in relation to Professor Tadiar's lecture, I wonder how we can put an end to the vicious cycle that Parrenas calls the work transfer system. Parrenas discusses the fact that many of the women who are hired to do domestic work in America end up hiring other women to do the same work for them. Does this need to change, and if so, how? I am slightly disappointed in not having found any proposals for a solution in this article.

In her article, "The Globetrotting Sneaker," Cynthia Enloe talks about the deplorable working conditions women in shoes factories face as a result of corporate irresponsibility. As I was reading the article, I started to think about how our economy always seems to prosper at the cost of someone else-- it is as if it is impossible to have a world where everyone has a fair and equal chance. Do you think that such a world could exist? Would our economies and governments have to drastically change? What would the implications of such changes be?

 In lecture on Tuesday professor Tadiar discussed domestic work. She stated that 95 percent of caretakers in NYC are women and close to 99 percent are foreign. A phrase that resonated with me most was "the globalization of domestic work/social reproduction". Not only is there a gender division in domestic work but also a racial division. Ehrenreich discusses a slogan from "Merry Maids" saying "we scrub your floors the old fashioned way, on our hands and knees". She later goes on to discuss how this custom is considered degrading by opposing companies and independent cleaners however, it has become a marketing tool for others. How has our society allowed these customs? Is it an issue or morals or personal choice? Who is to say who should raise your children--how do you control something that is perfectly legal and a personal decision?

12/4 Discussion

Before I post my question, I need to rant a little bit...

On page 51 of Enloe's The Globetrotting Sneaker, she provides Nike's justification for opening up factories in Indonesia, where the highest record for the country's daily wage was $1.89. The justification is: "Such wages should not be seen exploitative...but rather as the first rung on the ladder of economic opportunity that Nike has extended to workers with few options."

I would like to point this out, because this is the same argument that Jeffrey Sachs uses in his book, The End of Poverty, as the foundation of his Millennium Development Goals that address worldwide poverty, hunger and disease. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is also currently Special Advisor to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. He is a huge, attention-drawing name at Columbia University, and a driving force behind the UN agenda. He also has a his huge following of celebrity friends such as Bono and Angelina Jolie. I just wanted to put this information out there to note that this university system fuels a lot of his popularity and his ideas, which our readings seriously criticize.

Now for my question... our readings bring up the issue of hierarchy among women, one that correlates race, something that is arbitrary yet visible, to socio-economic status both domestically and internationally. At the same time, the readings also shed light to the issue of invisibility that is embedded into this same hierarchy. For example, Enloe discusses the struggles of women that are thousands of miles away from us, who produce our name brand sneakers. We can't see them and we will never meet them. In addition, Ehrenreich talks about how we should make the housework of our respective homes "visible" again. Which is the central problem of this hierarchy among women- visibility of differences, or the invisibility of those assigned to degraded jobs?

I was struck by Barbara Ehrenreich's article "Maid to Order": more specifically, I am fascinated by how dependent these American families are on their hired domestic help. On page 69, she writes that "fewer Americans know how to clean or even to 'straighten up'", and discusses how younger generations are unable to clean up their own messes. This made me wonder where today's society is going in terms of its own idealistic liberalism versus its inability to manage in the real world. As she writes in the last paragraph on p. 69, how do people simultaneously justify their belief in their own humanitarianism and their inherent refusal to do work that is "below" them? Can these be reconciled? What would be the reaction of this tier of society if domestic workers were outlawed? Would they be able to face their own hypocrisy?

After reading Ehrenreich's article, I find myself concluding that people criticize things in very strange ways. In Halberstam's article earlier this semester, which defined the "bathroom problem," I questioned why it was necessary to put such a strong social stigma on something as basic as excretion. There is also the relic of a social stigma on sex ever since the Victorian era, as Foucault has noted, and here in this week's articles is the presence of a societal stigma against the act of maintaining cleanliness. These are very basic functions that animals perform all the time (and let's face it, humans ARE animals in the scientific sense). The problem appears to be a class/race/gender conflict, but perhaps it is driven also by the inability of society to be satisfied with admittedly ever-shifting "normality" while still maintaining the pretenses of being so. The housework industry seems to be an example of instinctive competitiveness (survival luxury of the fittest), despite its consumers' attempts to depart from associations with "animals" and "lower class." To be "normal" or "like everyone else" is to fall out of consumer culture and the modern fashion to have better things and live better lives than others. One's ability to hire (and exploit) others - in this case, maids - is yet another way to distance "self" from "other" across various racial, gender, class and national borders and within both public and private domains.

In this week’s readings, I was particularly struck by the notion of the “hierarchy of womanhood,” as Parreñas puts it. I think it all starts with this bizarre ideology that while a domestic mother is not just socially acceptable, but admirable, a paid-domestic worker is viewed as “unskilled” work. Barbara Ehrenreich’s article further illuminates this notion that “…if you clean, you’re a scumball,” a mentality that goes along with women who are paid to raise other people’s children. Whenever you watch a show like “Oprah,” there is always this incredible praise for women who are stay-at-home mothers. So why is it considered such “dirty” work when other women take on these tasks? But Perreñas and Ehrenreich write about just one source of this “hierarchy of womanhood.” What about Enloe’s essay about women in factory work? She brings up the division amongst women in a whole other context, the context of competition. It’s amazing to me that the global economy has literally turned women against each other, whether relegating Filipina women from professionals to the subordinates of rich white women, or exploiting the “women-versus-women distrust” in the work place. I think these articles speak nicely to the beginning of the semester and the “What is Politics Now?” conference. The thing preventing the feminist movement from truly progressing is this distrust and competition amongst women. My question is, how do we overcome this? How do we play off the “intersectionality” of women so that we create a stronger global alliance amongst women?