Elizabeth Osborne

Sofía Ruiz-Alfaro

This volume explores the character of the domestic worker in twenty-first century Latin American cinema and analyzes how recent filmic representations of the housemaid question the marginalization of domestic servants, in particular women, by making them the center of their narratives, their families, and society. The essays in this book posit the female domestic worker as an emergent subjectivity, a complex character who problematizes and contests the hierarchical power structures within the family dynamics and new socioeconomic orders found in contemporary Latin America. Readers will find a variety of representations across the continent as well as transnational commonalities of the cinematic figure and role of the housemaid, including the negotiation of a multilayered politics of affection in the framework of prevalent paternalism, and the complex and contradictory dynamic between private and public spaces, where domestic paid labor occupies a central role in maintaining gender, class, and ethnic inequalities.

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