Abstract
The figure of the live-in maid condenses the contradictory aspects of material life at the intersection of the private and the public, intimacy and work, affect and power. This chapter analyzes the films La teta asustada (2009) by Peruvian Claudia Llosa, La nana (2009) by Chilean Sebastián Silva and Que Horas Ela Volta? (2015) by Brazilian Anna Muylaert as visual narrations that explore the relationship between live-in maids and employers. Focusing on the domestic dynamics in which this relationship unfolds, the films explore the conflict between class identity and affect. This chapter analyzes how food as a language of class and a situation of affect inscribes power and authority daily, tracing clear lines of recognition and a rejection of the “other.”
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Notes
- 1.
Marie Langer, Fantasías eternas a la luz del psicoanálisis (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Horné, 1966), 79–103.
- 2.
Elizabeth Kuznesof, “A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492–1980,” in Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, eds. Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 31.
- 3.
Omar Acha, Crónica sentimental de la Argentina peronista: Sexo , inconsciente e ideología, 1945–1955 (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2013).
- 4.
Acha, Crónica sentimental.
- 5.
Inés Pérez and Santiago Canevaro, “Languages of Affection and Rationality: Household Workers’ Strategies before the Tribunal of Domestic Work, Buenos Aires, 1956–2013,” International Labor and Working-Class History 88 (fall 2015): 130–49.
- 6.
Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. (New York: Routledge, 2016).
- 7.
Pérez and Canevaro, “Languages of Affection and Rationality,” 131.
- 8.
Pérez and Canevaro, “Languages of Affection and Rationality,” 113.
- 9.
Although recent academic research on paid domestic labor and live-in maids in Latin America has revealed changes in workers’ situations due to more comprehensive legislation, many experts still note the pervasive exploitation that predominates in this economic sector. After Chaney and García Castro’s seminal work (Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro, Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989]), two aspects have been prevalent in the study of live-in maids: the persistence of working situations akin to slavery, and the epistemological conflict that the topic presents for female researchers who must often use live-in maids themselves in order to accomplish the demands and goals of the academic field (Bruno Lautier, “Las empleadas domésticas latinoamericanas y la sociología del trabajo: algunas observaciones acerca del caso brasileño,” Revista mexicana de sociología 65, no. 4 [2003]: 810). In South America, paid domestic work and work as a live-in maid are still the first and second most common types of nonrural employment for females (Lautier, “Las empleadas domésticas”; Valenzuela and Mora, eds., Trabajo doméstico). Despite some recent advances in labor regulation, domestic workers still suffer from the lack of labor contracts and their positions are among the most precarious (María Gabriela Loyo and Mario Velásquez, “Aspectos jurídicos y económicos del trabajo doméstico remunerado en América Latina,” in Trabajo doméstico: Un largo camino hacia el trabajo decente, eds. María Elena Valenzuela and Claudia Mora [Santiago de Chile: OIT, 2009], 68).
- 10.
Sarah Archer, “Buying the Maid Ricoffy: Domestic Workers, Employers and Food,” South Africa Review of Sociology 42, no. 2 (2011): 66–82; Helma Lutz, “At Your Service Madam! The Globalization of Domestic Service,” Feminist Review 70 (2002): 89–104; Debora Gorbán, “Empleadas y empleadoras, tensiones de una relación atravesada por la ambigüedad/Domestics and their Employers, a Relationship Cut Through by Ambiguity,” Reis: Revista Española de Investigaciones Sociológicas 140 (October–December 2012): 29–48; Debora Gorbán and Ania Tizziani, “Circulación de información y representaciones del trabajo en el servicio doméstico,” El trabajo doméstico: Entre regulaciones formales e informales. Mirada desde la historia y la sociología. Cuadernos del IDES 30 (2015): 108–25.
- 11.
Jurema Brites, “Afeto e desigualdade: género, geração e clase entre empregadas domésticas e seus empregadores,” Cadernos Pagu 29 (2007): 91–109; Gorbán, “Empleadas y empleadoras, tensiones”; Encarnación Guitiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect: A Decolonial Approach on Value and the Feminization of Labor (New York: Routledge, 2010).
- 12.
Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, 5.
- 13.
Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, 5.
- 14.
Gorbán, “Empleadas y empleadoras, tensiones,” 34–35.
- 15.
Kofes 2001.
- 16.
For the purpose of this chapter, it is important to note here the distinction between affect and emotion. Lisa Feldman Barrett defines affect as the general sense of feeling that you experience throughout each day, “it is not emotion but a much simpler feeling with two features. The first is how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, which scientists call valence. … The second feature of affect is how calm or agitated you feel, which is called arousal. The energized feeling of anticipating good news … [and] the fatigue after a long run … are examples of high and low arousal. … Even a completely neutral feeling is affect” (Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain [New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017], 72). Therefore, affect is understood here as outer expressions of feelings or as “our immediate bodily reactions and sensations with regard to the energies of others and our environment” (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, 95). The term refers to the energy or relational force that permeates the body resulting from our ability to feel, and imprints emotional meaning to situations.
- 17.
Laura Mulvey, “Cinematic Gesture: The ghost in the machine,” Journal of Cultural Research 19, no. 1 (2015): 6.
- 18.
Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, 6.
- 19.
Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, “‘Why Should I Not take an Apple or a Fruit If I Wash Their Underwear?’ Food, Social Classification and Paid Domestic Work in Mexico,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 33, no. 2 (2012): 132.
- 20.
Korsmeyer 2002.
- 21.
Angela Meah, “Extending the Contested Spaces of the Modern Kitchen,” Geography Compass 10, no. 2 (2016): 41–55.
- 22.
Abril Saldaña-Tejeda, “‘Why Should I Not Take an Apple or a Fruit If I Wash Their Underwear?’ Food, Social Classification and Paid Domestic Work in Mexico,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 33, no. 2 (2012): 122.
- 23.
Michel Serres, Variations on the Body (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2011), 78, 79.
- 24.
Mulvey, “Cinematic Gesture,” 7.
- 25.
Mulvey, “Cinematic Gesture,” 6.
- 26.
Alison Krögel, Food, Power , and Resistance in the Andes: Exploring Quechua Verbal and Visual Narratives (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010), 11. In her analysis of Madeinusa (2010), also by Claudia Llosa, Krögel observes that the kitchen, recipes, and cooking are gestures of individual female resistance to paternal and societal power.
- 27.
Rojas 2017, 298–300.
- 28.
During the Spanish colonization of the Americas the Crown granted encomiendas to conquerors and individuals participating in the conquest enterprise, these consisted of ownership of land and a number of natives for labor.
- 29.
Dicen en mi pueblo/que los músicos hacen un/contrato secreto con una sirena/Si quieren saber cuánto durará/durará el contrato con esa sirena/de un campo oscuro tienen que coge/un puñado de quinua para la sirena/Y así la sirena se quede contando/Dice la sirena que cada grano significa un año/Cuando la sirena termine de contar/se lo lleva al hombre y le suelta al mar/Pero mi madre dice, dice, dice/que la quinua es muy difícil de contar/y la sirena se cansa de contar/Y así el hombre para siempre se queda con el don./In my village they say that musicians have a/secret contract with a mermaid.
For their music to be heard more than always/more than ever./If they want to know how long the agreement lasts/from a dark field they must pick/a handful of quinoa/to the mermaid they must give./So she starts counting until it lasts./They say each grain means a year./So when the mermaid finishes counting/she takes the musician and throws him to the sea./But my mother says, says, says/quinoa grains are too difficult to count/and the mermaid gets worn out, so the musician, forever, can embrace their gift. (“Sirena,” music by Selma Mutal and lyrics by Claudia Llosa)
- 30.
Serres, Variations on the Body, 68.
- 31.
Serres, Variations on the Body, 70.
- 32.
Karina Vázquez, “Corre, Muchacha, Corre: Estructura de clases y trabajo doméstico en La nana (2009), de Sebastián Silva,” Chasqui Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 43, no. 2 (November 2014): 161–78.
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Vázquez, K.E. (2020). Leftovers No More: Affect, Food, and Power in Recent Latin American Films on Domestic Work. In: Osborne, E., Ruiz-Alfaro, S. (eds) Domestic Labor in Twenty-First Century Latin American Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33296-9_4
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