Foreign Women and Toilets

Abstract

This article considers representations of migrant women who work as domestic help and probes the abjecting logic of cleaning practices vis-à-vis current issues of legality, illegality, immigration, transcultural difference, and rage. I survey diverse media depictions of foreign women and cleaning scenes in transnational settings: Fear and Trembling (2003), Maid in America (2004), The Ukrainian Cleaning Lady (2002), Dirt (2003), and Friends with Money (2006). I examine the formation and apprehension of female “foreign” subjectivity in relation to cleaning for others, in relation to dirt. The visual analysis discusses ways in which removing other people's dirt by an immigrant, migrant, or a guest worker intertwines with gendered and racialized processes of social abjection. Privileging images of toilets and expressions of rage, my analysis inquires into a conceptual correspondence between garbage and the cultural renditions of foreign others; into ways in which the concept of “dirt” gets transposed onto the cleaners suggesting that those who clean dirt are themselves disposable bodies, only useful and tolerable as long as they cohere the messy lives of “legitimate” and properly “clean” natives.

Keywords:

• foreign women
• cleaning
• dirt
• toilets
• abjection
• immigrant rage
• transnationalism

Notes

 1. See Banks (1990–1991).

 2. An activist was envisioned as a devoted socialist believer, an ideologue, and a political agitator; one of his or her functions was to lure people to become members of the party. In different circumstances, often depending on the type of work one did, the luring carried specific threats and promises. The often unspoken threats had to do with ostracism, one's exclusion from promotions and pay raises. The promises, at least discursively, were fully seductive: one was promised access to vacation spots, special coupons for cars and a faster access to getting an apartment.

 3. See Marciniak (2006).

 4. I am using the notion of “rage” evocatively here; the marches and protests, at least in Los Angeles, were overwhelmingly peaceful, though guarded heavily by the LAPD whose members accompanied the protesters on motorcycles, on horses, and in cars.

 5. I borrow this term from McHugh's analysis (1997, p. 17).

 6. I paraphrase DeSalvo's (2003) statement here. Writing about her Italian step-grandmother who, having come to the United States, was defined by her naturalization certificate as “Dark White,” DeSalvo concludes, “There was not one white race; there were several, and some were not as good as others” (2003, p. 27).

 7. The title references Wang's 2002 romantic comedy, Maid in Manhattan. Set in the contemporary New York city, the film, starring Jennifer Lopez as a Latina hotel maid single mother and Ralph Fiennes as a Republican senatorial candidate, is an “immigrant” Cinderella tale in which the hero's cross-class love “rescues” the female protagonist from the grueling life of servility devoted to cleaning up after the rich.

 8. This is Hondagneu-Sotelo's term (2001). See Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadow of Affluence, especially “Social Reproduction and New Regimes of Inequality: Transnational Motherhood” (pp. 22–27).

 9. According to Prado, there are over 100,000 domestic workers in Los Angeles, CA; most earn $5 per hour and have no health benefits.

10. This is Kristeva's term (1982, p. 1).

11. Quoted from Jordan (2006).

12. For an extensive discussion on Latina immigrant domestic workers, see Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001).

13. Etymologically, “the foreign” derives from the Latin foras meaning “outside.”

14. I thank Polish Television (TVP), especially Małgorzata Cup, Acquisitions and Sales Manager, for facilitating access to a copy of the film.

15. Because Ukraine is not part of the European Union, the Ukrainians, unlike Poles, cannot travel freely around Europe. Furthermore, tourist visas do not grant permission for legal work.

16. I thank Kelly Chisholm, an archivist at Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, for facilitating access to the copy of Savoca's film which is still not in distribution.

17. This is Naficy's term (1996).

18. I thank Áine O'Healy for inspiring discussions about this film.