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The trade in maids: Cross-cultural ...

Ray, Kasturi.

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The trade in maids: Cross-cultural readings of women's domestic work.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	The trade in maids: Cross-cultural readings of women's domestic work./
Author:	Ray, Kasturi.
Description:	168 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1785.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International65-05A.
Subject:	Literature, American. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3134341
ISBN:	0496815694

The trade in maids: Cross-cultural readings of women's domestic work.
Ray, Kasturi.

The trade in maids: Cross-cultural readings of women's domestic work. - 168 p.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1785.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2004.

This dissertation examines literary representations of Asian/Pacific American, African American, and postcolonial women's paid and unpaid domestic work. Although the work of maids---and their unpaid counterparts, housewives---often has been studied in isolation from each other, this dissertation seeks to make sense of the labor exchanged between them. I argue that demands for this trade arise at different moments of strain in the modern history of capitalism (for example, at the moments of capital's inception under conditions of imperialism, as well as later periods of crisis), and that the trade itself becomes organized under nationalist codes of race, class, and gender. I find that the logics sustaining this division of labor are surprisingly similar in both form and function across historical and national spaces: they serve to re-embed women's reproductive labor as an archaic, if not feudal, practice. I analyze different feminist responses to this assignment and, through the course of this dissertation, attempt to build a cross-cultural literary history of the ways paid domestic workers, in particular, have sought to transform the meaning and conditions of their employment.

ISBN: 0496815694Subjects--Topical Terms:

1017657
Literature, American.

The trade in maids: Cross-cultural readings of women's domestic work.
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245 1 4 $a The trade in maids: Cross-cultural readings of women's domestic work.
300 $a 168 p.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1785.
500 $a Adviser: Neil Lazarus.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brown University, 2004.
520 $a This dissertation examines literary representations of Asian/Pacific American, African American, and postcolonial women's paid and unpaid domestic work. Although the work of maids---and their unpaid counterparts, housewives---often has been studied in isolation from each other, this dissertation seeks to make sense of the labor exchanged between them. I argue that demands for this trade arise at different moments of strain in the modern history of capitalism (for example, at the moments of capital's inception under conditions of imperialism, as well as later periods of crisis), and that the trade itself becomes organized under nationalist codes of race, class, and gender. I find that the logics sustaining this division of labor are surprisingly similar in both form and function across historical and national spaces: they serve to re-embed women's reproductive labor as an archaic, if not feudal, practice. I analyze different feminist responses to this assignment and, through the course of this dissertation, attempt to build a cross-cultural literary history of the ways paid domestic workers, in particular, have sought to transform the meaning and conditions of their employment.
520 $a I discuss the deployment of three tropes of domestic labor in literary and social history: the issei (first-generation Japanese) picture bride of plantation Hawai'i (1880--1924); the bhadramahila (Hindu proper lady) of decolonizing Bengal (1920s--1970s); and the reanimated mammy (black female slave) figure of the Depression-era United States (1930s). I argue that these three figures of exemplary womanhood can be best understood as behavioral expectations that are extracted from women workers through coercive labor demands. These expectations, though commonplace, have been fiercely debated, particularly by those inserted into its regimes. I seek to recover these debates, paying particular attention to the ways in which they intersect. I conclude that rather than seeing the presence of domestic workers as remnants of a feudal order, their persistence can be read as a tutelary negotiation of capitalist contradiction, as well as a testimony to the necessity of their work and the creativity with which it survives.
590 $a School code: 0024.
650 4 $a Literature, American. $3 1017657
650 4 $a Women's Studies. $3 1017481
650 4 $a Black Studies. $3 1017673
650 4 $a Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies. $3 1017474
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710 2 0 $a Brown University. $3 766761
773 0 $t Dissertation Abstracts International $g 65-05A.
790 1 0 $a Lazarus, Neil, $e advisor
790 $a 0024
791 $a Ph.D.
792 $a 2004
856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3134341