‘Cute face and quiet … but her look don't match her personality’: Commodifying flesh, shaping labour expectations and domestic workers' treatment in Singapore

Abstract

While it is well established that domestic work has long been commodified, this paper builds on existing literature to show how employment agencies use the production of biodata to simultaneously, and strategically, homogenise and differentiate domestic workers in Singapore as racialised commodities. As such, and building on existing literatures on racialisation, bodily commodification, corporeality and domestic labour, this paper develops the concept of ‘fleshly commodity’ to convey domestic workers' positioning as racialised, captive, fungible and simultaneously homogenised and differentiated corporeal objects. Moreover, this paper will bring attention to the broader implications of the processes by which employment agencies market, fetishize, and then sell domestic workers. It does so by illuminating how recruitment practices shape the labour required/expected of domestic workers, before demonstrating how their living and working conditions and relations are also impacted. Through engagement with ethnographic data, this paper also demonstrates how domestic workers' humanity, personhood and agency continually contest and undo attempts to render them fleshly commodities.