Forcibly Queered: Documenting the Hong Kong “Helper”

This presentation treats the documentaries Sunday Beauty Queen (2017) and The Helper (2017) to explore how domestic workers in Hong Kong are represented as forcibly queered, forced by circumstance to operate on the queer time of singledom and non-normative gender roles (including asexuality), rather than the “natural” straight time of maternal roles and unpaid domestic labor for their own family. Popular media, including documentaries, see this queering as a violent act, one at the heart of the domestic worker’s exploitation, and thus attempt to “rescue” this queered figure by reinforcing her heteronormativity – not as Filipina/Indonesian, not as workers, but as mothers above all else. The displays of hyperfemininity at beauty pageants contrasts the asexual matron caretaker living in Hong Kong homes, and seeing the authentic “voice” of domestic workers as merely that of maternal sacrifice contrasts suspicions of domestic workers as sexually deviant, as well as the casual appearance of “butch” tomboy domestic workers as gendered non-normative (who appear instead as transmen).
This presentation reads the figure of the Southeast Asian domestic worker through a queer theoretical current to consider how sexual and gendered norms limit forms of emancipation to granting workers “straight time.” Migrant domestic workers are not merely queered sexually, but queered also as brown women inhabiting roles of affective labor, whose libidinal energies, as Neferti Tadiar puts it, are incorporated into the flow of global capital. Thus the “libido” of the domestic worker is “naturally” meant to focus entirely upon child rearing, a practice that becomes queered when it denies the natural role of unpaid motherhood for one’s “true” family. Recent queer theory from Jose Munoz, Hiram Perez, Eng-Beng Lim, Tan Hoang Hguyen, and others, allow me to trace the migrant domestic worker through imperial discourses considering brownness and binary sexualities (white male/brown boy, top/bottom, East Asian/Southeast Asian).

Christopher B. Patterson (Ph.D., U of Washington) teaches and researches cultural studies, literature, video games, digital humanities, and creative writing, within and across the transpacific. Before arriving at HKBU, he worked as an Assistant Professor in Nanjing, China, and as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His articles have appeared in American Quarterly, Games and Culture, M.E.L.U.S. (Multi-ethnic Literatures of the United States) and the anthologies Global Asian American Popular Cultures (NYU Press) and Queer Sex Work (Routledge). He writes book reviews for Asiatic and M.E.L.U.S., and is on the editorial board for Games and Culture. He hosts the podcast New Books in Asian American Studies, and spent two years as a program director for the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. His fiction, published under his alter ego Kawika Guillermo, has appeared in Feminist Studies, The Hawai’i Pacific Review, Drunken Boat and Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism & Beyond. He writes monthly articles for Drunken Boat and decomP Magazine, where he serves as the Prose Editor.