Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Cheng (Shu-Ju), Ada

Titel

Globalizing Home-Making, (En)Gendering Nation-Building: Foreign Domestics, State Control, and National Identity in Taiwan

Ist Teil von

• Society for the Study of Social Problems, 2001

Erscheinungsjahr

2001

Quelle

Sociological Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Most of the studies on domestic service focus on interpersonal dynamics between employers & domestics. A few studies look at how state policies shape household politics & intrude in family dynamics. Yet, hardly any studies have examined how the process of nationalization has configured the experiences of domestic workers under the context of globalization. That is, the linkage between household & nationalist politics has not been fully explored. In this article, I argue that the process of homemaking is simultaneously a process of nation-building. With the legalization of foreign domestics, domestic service has emerged as an object of ideological production & as a field of management in Taiwan. Certain discourses have emerged as part of the instruments for control & discipline over foreign domestics. Similar to the ideological production of foreign workers, foreign domestics are also constructed as "others." This discursive production aims at constructing them as a necessary evil, undesirably different from native Taiwanese yet essential to Taiwanese families. This process of othering is central to state practices of control & exclusion. The control over foreign domestics at home reflects the state's anxiety over a changing demographic landscape as well as the future contour of the nation.