4/19 lecture, Martin Manalansan; A Response
Siobhan Somerville, “I also feel like I’m free”: Disaffection, Alienation and Sexual Politics

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

posted under , , , , by Unit for Criticism

[Below is the text from Siobhan Somerville's response to Martin Manalansan's April 19 lecture, "Travels of Disaffection: Labor, Affect and Migration"]

“I also feel like I’m free”: Disaffection, Alienation, and Sexual Politics
A Response to Martin Manalansan’s “Travels of Disaffection”

Written by Siobhan Somerville (English and Gender & Women's Studies)

I’d like to thank Martin Manalansan for this wonderful paper and Lauren Goodlad and the Unit for Criticism for the invitation to comment on it.

In this incisive paper, Martin persuasively combines his reading of the film Paper Dolls (Bubot Niyar, dir. Tomer Heymann, 2006) with research among the film’s audiences in order to make a broader critique of the assumptions underlying much scholarship on gender, labor, and transnational migration. As Martin so astutely points out, much of the “chain of care” scholarship implicitly renders caregiving and domestic labor as (heterosexual) women’s work and relies on unexamined assumptions about the presumed affect of those caregiving subjects. His emphasis on the ways in which the strategic performance of “disaffection” might be understood within these economies of gender and labor opens up compelling new ways to understand, in his words, the “messy micropolitics” of survival.

Keeping my focus on the film Paper Dolls, I’d like to approach this set of issues briefly from another angle, one that I hope complements the work that Martin has done here. I want to consider how we might situate these questions about gender, labor, and affect in relation to debates about transnational migration and the production of lesbian, gay and transgender identity and culture within neoliberal economies.

In many reviews of the film Paper Dolls, critics repeatedly remark on the ways in which Israel’s apparent tolerance for lesbian/gay culture seems to compensate for the workers’ precarious job security and the drudgery of their actual workdays. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, for instance, remarks that “the transsexuals enjoy a more liberal atmosphere in Israel in contrast with that of their native country,” an interpretation echoed by reviewers for The New York Times, The Denver Post, and Film Journal International, to name just a few that I found in a relatively quick search. This is by now a familiar, if problematic, story, one that posits transnational migration as an escape from traditional, repressive models of gender and sexuality and as an opportunity to experience the sexual and gendered freedoms afforded by the presumed modernity of economically privileged nations.

We should, of course, be skeptical of this narrative. Yet this very story is spoken by some of the film’s subjects themselves, such as Jan, who says, “I only got a taste of this kind of life in Israel. I couldn’t dress like this in the Philippines. Earrings, dyed hair, makeup, lipstick. It’s forbidden. My father wouldn’t let me. He’d beat me. . . He doesn’t like homosexuals. Neither does my mother.” Sally, who, as Martin notes, becomes the emotional anchor of the film, offers a slightly different take, emphasizing that she expected Israel to be more, not less, repressive than the Philippines and that she has been pleasantly surprised at Israeli attitudes toward gender and sexuality.Attending an Israeli gay pride parade, where she is surrounded by rainbow flags and fellow revelers, Sally says: “We thought Israel was a sacred place, that everything is closed, people are religious, primitive. It’s very surprising that there is a Gay Pride Parade. I also feel like I’m free. I can do whatever I want.”

Sally’s sense that in Israel she is “free” is, of course, a fantasy, perhaps a necessary one, given the restrictive terms of her employment and immigration status, but also the ways in which gendered norms are policed within Israeli culture, including Israeli gay and lesbian culture (which itself cites transnational gay and lesbian culture). The filmmaker, Tomer Heymann, confronts his own anxieties about gender as he engages with and eventually befriends members of the Paper Dolls. He admits openly that he associates femininity with shame and, at one point, invites members of the Paper Dolls to perform a makeover on him, complete with make-up, wig, and dress, so that he can experience femininity firsthand. While he attempts to confront his own gender anxieties, Heymann also includes an extended conversation with a racist and transphobic cab driver, who spouts a string of hateful and violent opinions about his experiences with Filipinos both in Israel and the Philippines. Such scenes disrupt any easy celebration of gay, lesbian, or transgender “freedom” in Israel.

As the filmmaker himself begins to grow fond of the Paper Dolls and defend them against such hostility, he attempts to facilitate their dream of performing at one of Tel Aviv’s biggest and most happening nightclubs, TLV, setting up an audition for the troupe at his own mother’s house. While the promoter agrees to book the Paper Dolls, he does so on terms that undermine the group members’ relationship to each other and to their performances, terms that also reveal the limited possibilities for participating in what passes as gay and lesbian culture in the clubs. First, he eliminates certain performers, like Jan, whom he does not consider “professional.” Second, he insists that the Paper Dolls perform in costumes of his choosing, not in their own makeup and costumes (which sometimes feature the exuberant use of materials such as beanie babies). What he chooses, without explanation, is that the Paper Dolls perform as Japanese geishas. Here, I’m interested in how we might link this scene with the disaffection that characterizes Jan’s workplace performance, which Martin intriguingly sees as a potential basis for a new mode of activism and politics. How might we understand the politics of affect – or lack of it -- that the Paper Dolls perform as they are literally alienated in the process of becoming racialized and feminized commodities within the Tel Aviv club scene? The imposition of the figure of the Japanese geisha serves to discipline the Paper Doll’s more ambiguous gender and cultural references, which are on display in their own performances. (It’s worth noting that their earlier audition for the promoter had featured a performance of the Hava Nagila, a performance that toys not only with gender authenticity but also Israeli cultural authenticity.) Indeed, the filmmaker uses parallel editing in the club scene to contrast, on the one hand, the Paper Dolls’ enforced feminization and orientalization and, on the other hand, the unclothed muscular masculinism of the other dancers that night.

Whatever the promoter’s intentions and whatever the Paper Dolls’ affective response, the nightclub episode ends up successfully policing the material boundaries between immigrant and Israeli. As one of the Paper Dolls explains, “After our performance at TLV we realized that we should stay within our own community. We should give up the dream of performing in those big places. It’s not for us.” In this refusal, I’m left wondering how the politics of gender and race in the club end up echoing the state’s attempt to control the movement and potential integration of the immigrant workers into Israeli life. How does gay and lesbian culture – in its own modes of commodification – draw on the language of “professionalism” as a way to reinscribe normative gender differences and to exclude those who cannot or will not inhabit those norms?

As a coda to this response, I want to briefly refer to the film’s own coda, in which we learn that three of the Paper Dolls have subsequently moved to London, where they continue to work as caregivers for elderly Jewish patients. They also continue to perform, now as “Paper Dolls from Israel.” What do we make of the fact that they bill their act this way and not as “Paper Dolls from the Philippines”? To what extent do they perform or reject origin narratives as a way to mark their own relationship to transnational migration, histories of labor, and belonging? And, finally, if these workers function as an “affective wall” between Israelis and Palestinians, how does that function itself migrate transnationally, either through their embodied labor or through the film itself?
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4/19 Lecture, Martin Manalansan: "Travels of Disaffection:
Labor, Affect, and Migration"
Guest Writer: Chase Dimock

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

posted under , , , , , , , by Unit for Criticism

[On April 19, 2010 the Unit for Criticism hosted "Travels of Disaffection: Labor, Affect, and Migration," a lecture by Martin Manalansan, associate professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies. Siobhan Somerville, associate professor of English and Gender & Women's Studies, responded.]

Paper Dolls and The Global Heart Transplant: A Few Reflections on Martin Manalansan’s “Travels of Disaffection: Labor, Affect, and Migration”

Written by Chase Dimock (Comparative & World Literature)



Manalansan injected his lecture for the Unit for Criticism with the tone of an intervention into the increasingly heteronormative perspective of recent scholarly work published on gender and migration. Specifically, he questioned the “chain of care” paradigm, which he defines as
A linear concatenation of bodies and feelings propelled by the migration of Third World women to the First World. Third World women are torn away from their biological families and forced to leave their children in the care of poorer women in the homeland, to take care of the progeny of modern working mothers of the first world.

In their 2003 book Global Woman, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild argue that this chain of care results in a “global heart transplant,” where the domestic labor of these third world women is uprooted from their native land and relocated in the first world where their employment as care workers takes on the function of surrogate or supplementary mothers, wives, daughters and other affective, pseudo-familial roles.

Manalansan placed this unquestioned equation of care work with the affective assumptions of femininity under a queer critique, speculating, “What if we include such queer creatures as gay men, single and married women with no "maternal instinct," and transgendered persons into the mix? How can we queer this particular migratory diaspora without dismissing the struggles of some of its constituents?”

In search of an alternative framework for conceptualizing this “chain of care,” Manalansan pointed toward Tomer Heymann’s 2005 documentary Paper Dolls. Filmed originally as a 6-part program for Israeli television and then distilled into a feature-length documentary for the film festival circuit, Paper Dolls follows the life and labor of five transgender migrant workers from the Philippines who, by day, work as caregivers for elderly Orthodox Jewish men and, by night, perform drag shows in a troupe known as Paper Dolls. In his analysis, Manalansan focused specifically on the contrasting personalities of two laborers: Sally, who exhibits the expected "feminine" traits of a care giver--maternalism, geniality and an emotional bond with her client--and Jan, whose more "masculine" appearance and manner suggest a lack of emotional attachment to her client.

Siobhan Somerville and Martin Manalansan


What I found most interesting about Manalansan’s analytical approach toward the film was the importance he placed in the audience’s reception of the documentary. Manalansan organized a focus group of Filipinos in both New York and Manila and recorded how they reacted to the starkly contrasting figures of Sally and Jan. The focus group identified Sally as an affirmation of the naturally caring Filipino disposition, describing her as a Bakla man with a female heart. Manalansan accounts for this interpretation based on the profound investment that Filipino culture has in the image of the Filipina woman as an embodiment of care and nurture. This investment extends to the Filipino government that has turned the migrant Filipino careworker into a global ambassador of Filipino values and culture, mandating that all care workers complete a level of training before they work in a foreign nation.

In opposition to Sally, the focus group members found Jan to be disingenuous and unfriendly, questioning why he would go into the field of care work if he found no joy in it. Yet, members of the focus groups also pointed out that Jan exhibited a high level of skill and professionalism and defended his right to keep his job based on these merits.

Manalansan isolates Jan as an embodiment of “disaffection,” a perpetual emotional distance from his work which allows him both to perform his work at a high level of skill and to cope with the isolation of being a migrant worker functioning under government prescriptions that mandate specific conduct from a foreign labor force. Were either Sally or Jan to be fired by their client, they would be deported from Israel in spite of the productive labor they invested or any personal or professional bonds and identities they had forged in the process.

Thus, Manalansan put forth disaffection both as a way of 1) questioning the presumed affective nature of care work and 2) exploring how the forces of global capitalism and state power force migrant laborers, who are barred from full integration into the state, to disidentify with their migratory setting and cultivate a detached care for the self.

I was most struck by the pronounced masculine and feminine encoding of the “domestic” versus the “professional” which attempts to navigate the liminal space between the public and the private sphere that care workers inhabit. Although Sally’s “feminine” disposition toward her work better embodies the cultural ideal of the care worker, the affective bond she exhibits with her client tends to obscure the fact that she is a paid laborer and not the “adopted daughter” that we are inclined to read her as.

Conversely, Jan’s more “masculine” demeanor demystifies the sentimental interpretation of the relationship between pure laborer and client reinscribing the latter as professionalism. Jan’s lack of “domestic joy” reminds the viewer that although care workers labor in someone’s home, they are paid employees and should be entitled to the full array of labor rights regardless of how happy or affectionate they appear to be. Historically, domestic workers have been on the bottom end of advancements in labor rights. For example, Angela Davis argues that African-American women benefited less from the implementation of labor laws in the 20th century because these laws only recognized labor in the public sphere of private corporations and ignored the fact that a large proportion of the labor force worked in private homes and, thus, were presumed to inhabit the domestic sphere. Because they performed gendered labor seen as a supplement of a woman’s domestic role, they were relegated to the vicissitudes and abuses of patriarchal control over the domestic sphere.

Jan and Sally’s elderly clients do not fully embody the typical image of patriarchal control over the private sphere because of their infirmed state. Instead, the Israeli government inhabits this patriarchal position, enforcing certain norms of care and thus attempting to establish a uniform relationship between careworker and care recipient; a contractual relation enforced by government and enacted in a private home. With this in mind, I wonder how Manalansan’s queering of the chain of care, which focuses mostly on the queerness of the providers of care, may also extend to a queering of the recipient of care. The two elderly men depicted in Manalansan’s presentation are both alone, inhabiting a space outside the heteronormative nuclear family. Whether they have outlived their wives and lost contact with their next of kin or never decided to have a family, their elderly and infirm state has placed them in a queer position in which they inhabit the solitude of an atomized individual, but lack the requisite ability to take care of themselves which we typically assume of individuality.

These men rely upon the state to provide migrant labor in order to fill roles that the heteronormative family structure failed to fill (i.e., retirement plan of having one’s children care for you). The state intervenes to supplement the absent heteronormative family with pseudo-familial care performed to the state’s specifications. Just as Sally, Jan, and the other migrant care workers feel the constant presence of governmental standards influence their professional and personal identities, so too have the identities of their clients been shaped by the enforced norms of the Israeli welfare state.

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