Women Domestic Workers Reveal Secrets of the Trade

Abstract

Rather than simply lamenting migrant workers’ everyday struggles and harsh working conditions, Ma Xiang’s essay seeks to provide a structural analysis of the socioeconomic injustice facing tens of millions of domestic helpers. Strengthening an insider’s plain account with narrative strategies of reportage literature and investigative journalism, this short piece demonstrates migrant workers’ unrecognized capacity to make a critical examination of the systematic exploitations and inequalities in a capital-dominant world.

Notes

1 The need for care work, including domestic services, for fully employed professionals increases with the rise of job opportunities and working hours in urban areas, where most of the day is spent on paid work instead of taking care of duties at home.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiang Ma

Ma Xiang hails from Shuangyashan, a small town in northeast China. In 2005, she migrated to Beijing to start working as a domestic worker.

Melinda Chen

Melinda Chen is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a graduate certificate in East Asian Languages & Cultures from the University of Kansas. Her work draws on the queer of color critique and transnational feminisms to examine and improve anti-sexual violence advocacy for survivors of sexual assault.