Cute face and quiet...but her look don't match her personality: commodifying flesh, shaping labour expectations, and domestic workers' treatment in Singapore

Laura Antona

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: While it is well established that domestic work has long been commodified, this paper builds on existing literature to show how employment agencies use the production of biodata to simultaneously, and strategically, homogenise and differentiate domestic workers in Singapore as racialised commodities. As such, and building on existing literatures on racialisation, bodily commodification, corporeality, and domestic labour, this paper develops the concept of ‘fleshly commodity’ to convey domestic workers’ positioning as racialised, captive, fungible, and simultaneously homogenised and differentiated corporeal objects. Moreover, this paper will bring attention to the broader implications of the processes by which employment agencies market, fetishize, and then sell domestic workers. It does so by illuminating how recruitment practices shape the labour required/expected of domestic workers, before demonstrating how their living and working conditions and relations are also impacted. Through engagement with ethnographic data, this paper also demonstrates how domestic workers’ humanity, personhood, and agency continually contest and undo attempts to render them fleshly commodities.

Keywords: biodata; commodification; corporeal; domestic work; flesh; migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14 pages
Date: 2023-06-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1, June, 2023, 48(2), pp. 425 - 438. ISSN: 1475-5661

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/117350/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:117350

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().