Beyond the ‘All Seeing Eye’: Filipino Migrant Domestic Workers’ Contestation of Care and Control in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on ethnographic data about Filipino migrant domestic workers’ perceptions of and responses to the use of surveillance cameras in the home to intervene in recent debates about surveillance, care and social control. On the one hand, our participants disclose what we refer to as the gendered ironies of care and control. Digital surveillance practices in the home not only produce tactics for evading control but also reduce the capacity of migrant workers to deliver the best possible care that is ostensibly the basis for the deployment of new forms of watching. On the other hand, the responses we document here speak to critiques of the Foucauldian vision of surveillance derived from the panopticon that are ‘abstract, disembodied and distrustful’. In contrast to the Benthamite reading of God’s all seeing eye, Filipino migrant workers invoke a relational vision which speaks to connectedness, trust and the possibility of mutual concern. While the use of covert surveillance cameras especially was perceived as undermining the trust necessary for care relationships, some respondents used the devices to provoke face to face encounters deemed necessary to re-establish relations of trust.

KEYWORDS:

• Care and control
• surveillance
• migration
• gender
• Hong Kong
• Philippines

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all the participants in our study for the time and care taken to complete the smartphone diaries and for sharing their insights about the surveillance practices they routinely encounter and challenge. We are also grateful for the constructive suggestions of participants at the care and control workshops, especially Nicole Constable, as well as the anonymous reviewer for helping us to further refine and distil our analysis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mark Johnson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3841-5717

Maggy Lee http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8465-062X

Notes

1 This research was funded by a British Academy grant: BA SG151983. In order to safeguard participants’ privacy and protect other people’s anonymity, we asked participants never to disclose employers’ identities, take or share photos of other people, or their homes, without their consent. Taking photos of other people’s children was to be especially avoided. We also asked our participants to only record diary entries when it was appropriate and safe and to ensure phones were password protected.

2 See Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance Cap. 486 enacted in 1995 and amended in 2012. See also Eric Szweda (2013).

3 Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (2004).

4 See Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by British Academy [grant number SG151983].