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Sexualities, migrations, domestic work, construction of the body, disciplinarization, moralization, The PhilippinesSexualités en mouvement. Du travail domestique mondialisé à la normalisation des corps sexués
Abstract:
This article aims to analyze the process through which migrant Filipina domestic workers’s bodies and sexualities are normalized. Based on an ethnographic analysis of recruitment and training practices of Filipina domestic workers, this article highlights how domestic worker skills are constructed by relying/drawing on certain stereotypes such as "docility", being "hardworking" and able to "adapt” as well as on a control of sexualities. In doing so, this paper points to the importance of analyzing techniques of control of migrants’ sexualities to understand how skills and social roles are produced in the global care economy. More specifically, this research underlines how migrant sexualities come to reflect a particular “ethics of care“. It therefore shows how the control of sexualities becomes an issue linked to ideas of "health risk", “professionalism”, “economic profit” and “the country’s reputation”. Finally, by analyzing the techniques of governmentality of domestic workers’ bodies and sexualities, this article underlines the process of subjectivation at work during the trainings within the Philippines’s migration industry.
