But on Sunday, They Are Free: Tomboy Domesticity and Home Time in Sunday Beauty Queen

This article examines the site of the home in Baby Ruth Villarama's 2016 documentary to better understand how tomboy migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong mess up and queer domesticity. By focusing on the appearances in the film of the home of Leo Selomenio, a tomboy Filipino migrant domestic h...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:GLQ 2024-10, Vol.30 (4), p.409-426
Main Author: Dela Cruz, Ariel M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Beauty
Cultural Studies
Diaspora
Domesticity
Ethics
Exemption
Families & family life
Gender and Sexuality
Infants
Job requirements
Labor
LGBTQ Studies
Migrant workers
Philippino
Queer Theory
Refuge
Resistance
Southeast Asian cultural groups
Theory and Philosophy
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Summary:This article examines the site of the home in Baby Ruth Villarama's 2016 documentary to better understand how tomboy migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong mess up and queer domesticity. By focusing on the appearances in the film of the home of Leo Selomenio, a tomboy Filipino migrant domestic helper and organizer of Sunday beauty pageants, the author explores alternative modes of care performed by tomboys that refuse respectability politics as they operate within transnational migrant labor structures. Despite the regulatory and confining modes of racialized and gendered care that structure global care work, Selomenio reconfigures and reshapes his home to operate as a site of refuge, an archive, a gathering space, and a site of resistance. Engaging in what the author terms “tomboy domesticity,” Selomenio utilizes his control over home space and time as a result of his exemption from the live-in requirement of his work to ensure collective survival in the face of labor precarity. Selomenio's performance of care ethics that refuse the state's neglect of domestic helpers articulates tomboy and diasporic Filipino life as valuable outside of its capacity to labor.
ISSN:1064-2684
1527-9375
DOI:10.1215/10642684-11331058