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.

ELLA PARRY-DAVIES is a lecturer in theater, performance, and critical theory at King’s College London.

“The testimonies in Intimate Inequalities reveal how lived reckonings intersect, in unequal and unstable ways, with broader structures . . . In this sense, both the analyses of the recordings and the recordings themselves offer a critical hermeneutics of transnational structures of exploitation and of colonial, postcolonial, and neo‑colonial forms of dehumanization.” —Journal of Sonic Studies

“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

“Intimate Inequalities is a bold and caring study of the lives of Filipino domestic workers employed in the UK and Lebanon, interrogating power at the intersections of gender, race, political economy, domestic labour, immigration, and transnationalism. Working intimately with her collaborators through innovative performance methods, Parry-Davies works through the inequities that undergird performance research itself, and models ethical performance ethnography in foregrounding  her interlocutors as agential subjects and creative interlocutors.” —Royona Mitra, Brunel University