The Dual Discourse About Peruvian Domestic Workers in Santiago de Chile: Class, Race, and a Nationalist Project

2006 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silke Staab ◽  
Kristen Hill Maher
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Field Study ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Santiago De Chile ◽  
Time Shape ◽  
Migrant Domestic Workers

AbstractThis article examines the functions of the “dual discourse” about Peruvian migrant domestic workers in contemporary Santiago. A 2002 field study found that middle-class employers of Peruvian workers simultaneously praised them as superior workers and denigrated them as uneducated and uncivilized. While this response is not unique to Santiago, this study argues that it fulfilled particular ideological functions in this context. The praise served to discipline the Chilean working class, who middle-class employers claimed no longer knew their place. The epithets served as a foil for Chilean national identity. Stories about Peruvians serve as tools in ongoing ideological contestations over class, race, and nation in Chile and, at the same time, shape the working conditions and integration of the migrants themselves.

Re-examining the middle-class thesis: Class profiles of families employing migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong

2021 ◽  
pp. 011719682110696
Author(s):  
Adam Ka-Lok Cheung
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Quantitative Data ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Household Survey ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Population Census ◽  
Economic Background ◽  
Working And Living Conditions ◽  
Migrant Domestic Workers

To what extent is employing migrant domestic workers (MDWs) a middle-class practice in Hong Kong? I drew quantitative data from the Population Census and a representative household survey to test the middle-class thesis. The results show that a significant proportion of the families that currently employ or had ever employed MDWs were not from middle-class backgrounds. As the practice of hiring MDWs spread to families from lower socio-economic background, it may be expected that the working and living conditions of MDWs may deteriorate due to the fewer resources of these families.

Performing the “Foreign Maid” in the Global Market

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jimena Ortuzar
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Asian Women ◽  
Global Cities ◽  
Youtube Videos ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Migrant Domestic Workers

YouTube videos of migrant domestic workers made by private recruitment agencies reproduce Southeast Asian women as transnational subjects whose mobility across borders is largely dependent on their performance of the ideal “foreign maid” — a figure that has become central to the maintenance of middle-class lifestyles in global cities across Asia and beyond.

Social and National Identity: A Focus on Class, Gender, and Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christel Lane
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Small Proportion ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Social Mixing ◽  
Gender And Nation

This chapter examines the class identity of both publicans and patrons of gastropubs, as well as the greatly diminished but not eliminated gender differences in the use of the bar. The importance of female dining customers to the economic health of pubs is highlighted, and the differences in male and female sociality are explored. The largely middle-class character of gastropubs is highlighted, and the confinement of social mixing to the upper and middle classes, as well as a small proportion of the lower middle and skilled working class is documented. The provision of traditional English bar food and the widespread embrace by customers of Sunday roast dinners is linked to a lingering English national identification.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

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