The queer promise of pageantry: queering feminized migration and the labor of care in Sunday Beauty Queen (2016)

ABSTRACT

This article examines Baby Ruth Villarama’s Sunday Beauty Queen to explore representations that unsettle heteronormative ideas around Filipina domestic workers’ bodies and labor. First, I analyze the aesthetics of pageantry in Villarama’s camerawork to argue that the film, in visually queering straight cisgender Filipina bodies, challenges scripts of heteropatriarchal portrayal of care labor. By using cinematic “queer time,” the documentary troubles the “straight time” of care work as linear flow from left-behind families at homeland to host families at destination countries and back. This dovetails to a discussion of how the labor of care is queered within the homosocial community of migrant Filipina women abroad through the conception of community of care. By queering the labor of care, I unveil forms of queer intimacies and practices that reveal how pageantry and community building produce spaces for non-normative and nonbiological affinities for alternative modalities of care exchange. By looking at the intersections of queer and migration studies, I explore how Villarama’s documentary represents spaces and social practices that offer alternative imaginaries of care that exceeds naturalized and normalized understanding of feminized labor diaspora.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant domestic workers
• queer studies
• documentary film
• beauty pageant
• global care chain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carlos M. Piocos

Carlos M. Piocos III is an associate professor at Literature Department and a research fellow at Southeast Asia Research Center and Hub of De La Salle University. His main research interests are cultural studies, Southeast Asian literature and film, and gender and migration studies. E-mail: [email protected]