God Blessed Me with Employers Who Don’t Starve Their Helpers: Food Deprivation and Dehumanization in Domestic Work

Abstract

This paper explores the corporeal dimensions of dehumanization in intimate labour through the provision of food for domestic workers by employers. The concept of dehumanization offers a useful framework for understanding the spectrum of harms, abuses or vulnerabilities that workers may experience in domestic work. These include both those that may be legally recognizable as criminal offences as well as harms that may be woven into the day to day management of private households. We argue that food, specifically the food provided by employers to domestic workers, presents a fruitful lens for understanding how domestic work, as a form of intimate labour (Boris and Parreñas, 2010; Constable, 2009b), is managed, controlled, negotiated or resisted. This analysis starts with an examination of the intimate management of inequality through food, based on interviews with 48 Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. This is followed by an analysis of domestic workers’ resistance to dehumanizing food practices and concludes with a discussion of the potential of food practices in rehumanizing domestic work.