Living and Dying without a Care in the World: Twenty-first Century Sinophone Cinema’s Affective Attunement to the Growing Deficit Yet Enduring Feminization of Care
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Date
2024-08-07
Authors
Lee, Kwan Yin
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This project asserts that recent Sinophone narrative films — Ann Hui’s A Simple Life (2011), Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo (2013) and Oliver Chan’s Still Human (2018) — lauded for portraying domestic workers respectfully warrant critical attention not for their ostensibly progressive representations, but the affective resonance they create among middle-class viewers in response to the care deficit under neoliberal austerity. Rather than approaching the films as players in the realm of representational politics or international film festival circuits, my analysis attends to their affective registers, from what I term as reticent nostalgia to bearable awkwardness to tears of joy, as validation of and misgivings about the neoliberalism’s disregard for social reproductive needs unless they come with profit-making prospects. Without scrutinizing these texts’ promotion of acquiescence, albeit conflicted, to the privatization of and inequitable access to care, the transnational domestic work industry using Southeast Asian women of color and in poverty to ensure low-cost care for white-collar workers and their offsprings or those who have fallen through the cracks of the porous social safety net in East Asia would remain a well-oiled machine.