Overview

Mobilizing performance to amplify migrant domestic workers' creative expertise Intimate inequalities exist where the embodied and the everyday rub up against transnational structures of power. Ella Parry-Davies conducted collaborative research with migrant domestic workers from the Philippines living in the UK and Lebanon, where migration is regulated by employer sponsorship systems, to explore how they negotiate the intimacy of the family home and the attendant inequalities of laboring within it. Intimate Inequalities: Performing Migrant Domestic Work brings these conditions into focus while articulating a methodological inquiry into the dynamics of collaborative performance research. Parry-Davies examines site-specific soundwalks, recorded and coedited with domestic workers, which steer the book between church choirs in Beirut and activist gatherings in London, and from urban performances in Lebanon's 2019 revolution to mutual aid organizing amid COVID-19 in the UK. Breaking with prevalent depictions of migrant domestic workers as voiceless and victimized, Intimate Inequalities mobilizes performance as both an analytic lens and a practical methodology, amplifying its subjects' expertise while reckoning with the intimate yet unequal dynamics of research itself.

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9780810149106

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Reviews

""An eloquent and engaged study of the lived worlds of domestic workers in Lebanon, refreshing in its use of performance-based research methods and acutely sensitive to detail. Parry-Davies offers a careful yet bold approach to performance ethnography."" -  Sruti Bala, University of Amsterdam

Author Information

Ella Parry-Davies is a lecturer in theater, performance, and critical theory at King's College London.

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