"Not Just Friends, Not Quite Lovers": Filipina Migrant Domestic Workers' Untamed Intimacies.

Abstract

"Not just friends, not quite lovers" is how a Filipina migrant domestic worker described her ambiguous relationship with another Filipina worker in Hong Kong. This article examines this leaky fluid experience of migrant women's intimacies as a critical entry point to rethink migrant's queer sociality and relational practices of love and care. I argue that migrant women's intimate relationships with each other are structured alongside the neoliberal logics of domestic care in racial capitalism. Yet, it has a different relationship to racial capitalism. Migrant women's intimacy queers and disorientates the logics and power structure that limits migrant women's bodies to be just care giving bodies. By caring for one another, migrant workers resist the commodification of their bodies as disposable commodities. Instead, they offer their own articulations of sociality that reimagine logics of care in the chain of care framework in three ways, first, they disrupt ideas of classed heteronormative intimacies within and beyond Hong Kong; following this, they interrupt the logic of care as they redirect care away from the "proper subjects of care"; and, third, these intimate acts rewrite imaginations of power relations about how one should be cared (and/or care) for in the global care economy.