Queer, brown, migrant: documenting the Hong Kong ‘Helper’

Abstract

This paper treats the documentaries Sunday Beauty Queen (2017) and The Helper (2017) to explore how domestic workers in Hong Kong are represented as forcibly queered, forced by circumstance to operate on the queer time of non-normative gender roles, rather than the ‘natural’ straight time of maternity and unpaid domestic labour for their own family. Popular media, including documentaries, see this queering as a violent act, one at the heart of the domestic worker’s exploitation, and thus attempt to ‘rescue’ this queered figure by reinforcing her heteronormativity – not as Filipina/Indonesian, not as workers, but as women and mothers above all else. I consider how, in these films, unspoken forms of queer culture and queer relationships contrast dominant depictions of asexual matronly caretakers. Attempts to capture domestic workers through the documentary camera inevitably reveal the queer practices and desires that migrancy makes available, as the communal and non-filial intimacies within these films also depict domestic workers outside of the ‘straight time’ of motherhood and reproduction, and within a ‘queer time’ of non-biological reproduction and same-sex community. To better understand the preoccupation with the workers’ ‘voice’, this paper also reflects on the intersections of queerness and migration with brownness, a racial optic that signifies ambiguity and mixture, but also restricts brown women into lower-class migrant labour, and imports colonial attitudes towards Southeast Asian sexuality.

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