Latina/Latino Studies Event Calendar

View Full Calendar

Latina/Latino Studies Postdoctoral Colloquium Series: "Assembling Laboring Bodies: Migrant Domestic Work and the Aesthetics of Precarity"

Event Type
Lecture
Sponsor
Department of Latina/Latino Studies
Location
217 Noyes Lab
Date
Oct 30, 2019   4:00 - 5:30 pm  
Speaker
Dr. Maria Lopez-Garcia
E-Mail
lls-studies@illinois.edu
Phone
217-265-0370
Views
80

This talk explores the relationship between the racial performativity of brownness, migrant subjectivity, and precarity in migrant domestic work. Analyzing the work of Filipinx and Latinx artists Ramiro Gomez, Kimberley Arteche, Claudia Cano, and Imelda Cajipe-Endaya among others, this presentation inquiries about the implications of situating the laboring body of migrant domestic workers as a performing body. This research highlights how the laboring body when rendered visible through aesthetic practices deploys a relational vision of the racialized and gendered scripts underwritten by shared genealogies of colonialism and the global service industry. The aesthetics emerging from “feeling brown” while caring for others in America, as I will show in this presentation, serve as a collective refusal to the social and economic devaluation of domestic workers’ lives and labor; as an emancipatory project that allows for the social recognition of domestic labor and for alternative ways of reclaiming subjectivity. The archive analyzed in this presentation conveys valuable examples of the decolonial and anti-capitalist epistemic perspective of domestic labor’s expressive culture.

link for robots only