Commodifying Care: Migrant Literature and Materialist Feminism

Abstract

Taking my cue from the recent critical and popular efflorescence of social reproduction theory, this chapter looks to the commodified gendered dynamics of our neoliberal conjuncture by focusing on migrant women’s poorly paid domestic work. It draws on two novels about female domestics, published either side of the 2008 financial crash, Thrity Umrigar’s Mumbai-set tragedy, The Space Between Us (2005) and Christy Lefteri’s topical, Cypriot-based Songbirds (2021). Both make visible the gendered labour not taken into account sufficiently in economic discussion, while simultaneously reflecting the challenges of writing about those with lesser social standing. If Umrigar investigates the tensions of madamhood from a self-confessed problem-space within (inviting her middle-class readers to do the same), Lefteri struggles to render the same concerns from without (encouraging the passive hand-wringing of a European liberal readership). One final tension troubles both books though: while registering and resisting processes of commodification, they simultaneously commodify the voices of women who otherwise might not have the means to tell, or sell, their own stories. In this way, the novels express the problems of commodification inherent to an uneven literary marketplace.