Domestic work = language work? Language and gender ideologies in the marketing of multilingual domestic workers in London
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.35581Keywords:
language ideology, gender ideology, corpus linguistics, domestic work, nanny, londonAbstract
The hiring of domestic workers – normally female – in the globalised economy involves assumptions and expectations not only about the so-called ‘natural’ female instinct for childcare and cleaning, but also about language use and transmission. Domestic worker agencies play an important role at the interface between the public sphere (where the languages are normally valuable) and the home (the workplace of domestic workers). An examination of the skills discourses used in the marketing of domestic workers reveals tensions between the language and gender ideologies underpinning this juncture. Using corpus linguistics to examine London-based domestic worker agency websites, findings reveal highly traditional and conservative notions of language and gender underpinning contradictory arguments about the supposedly advantageous nature of multilingualism.
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Baker, Paul (2006) Using corpora in discourse analysis. London: Continuum.
Baker, Paul (2013) Introduction: virtual special issue of Gender and Language on corpus approaches. Gender and Language V1. Retrieved 30 August 2019 from https://journals.equinoxpub.com/GL/article/view/17185.
Benz, Victoria (2018) Bilingual Childcare: Hitches, Hurdles and Hopes. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781783099184
Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) The economics of linguistic exchanges. Social Science Information 16(6): 645–68.
Bourdieu, Pierre (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cameron, Deborah (2003) Gender and language ideologies. In Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff (eds) The Handbook of Language and Gender 447–67. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Cameron, Deborah (2005) Language, gender, and sexuality: current issues and new directions. Applied Linguistics 26(4): 482–502. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ami027
Cox, Rosie (2006) The Servant Problem: Paid Domestic Work in a Global Economy. London: I. B. Tauris.
Cox, Rosie (2011) Competitive mothering and delegated care: class relationships in nanny and au pair employment. Studies in the Maternal 3(2): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.16995/sim.66
Curdt-Christiansen, Xiao Lan and La Morgia, Francesca (2018) Managing heritage language development: opportunities and challenges for Chinese, Italian and Pakistani Urdu-speaking families in the UK. Multilingua 37(2): 177–200. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2017-0019
Del Percio, Alfonso, Flubacher, Mi-Cha and Duchêne, Alexandre (2017) Language and political economy. In Ofelia García, Nelson Flores and Massimiliano Spotti (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society 55–75. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212896.013.4
Divita, David (2014) Language ideologies across time: household Spanish handbooks from 1959 to 2012. Critical Discourse Studies 11(2): 194–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2013.852985
Duchêne, Alexandre and Del Percio, Alfonso (2014) Economic capitalization of linguistic diversity: Swiss multilingualism as a national profit? In Johann Unger, Michal Krzyzanowski and Ruth Wodak (eds) Multilingual Encounters in Europe’s Institutional Spaces 75–102. London: Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472541987.ch-004
England, Kim and Stiell, Bernadette (1997) ‘They think you’re as stupid as your English is’: constructing foreign domestic workers in Toronto. Environment and Planning 29: 195–215. https://doi.org/10.1068/a290195
Gonçalves, Kellie and Schluter, Anne (2017) ‘Please do not leave any notes for the cleaning lady, as many do not speak English fluently’: policy, power, and language brokering in a multilingual workplace. Language Policy 16(3): 241–65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-016-9406-2
Heller, Monica (2010) The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 101–14.
Heller, Monica and Duchêne, Alexandre (2016) Treating language as an economic resource: discourse, data and debate. In Nicolas Coupland (ed.) Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates 139–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781107449787.007
Hochschild, Arlie and Machung, Anne (2012) The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home, 2nd edition. London: Penguin.
ILO (2017) Domestic workers. Retrieved 11 January 2018 from www.ilo.org/global/topics/domestic-workers/lang--en/index.htm.
Jacquemet, Marco (2005) Transidiomatic practices: language and power in the age of globalization. Language and Communication 25: 257–77. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2005.05.001
Johnson, Sally and Ensslin, Astrid (2007) ‘But her language skills shifted the family dynamics dramatically’: language, gender and the construction of publics in two British newspapers. Gender and Language 1(2): 229–54. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.v1i2.229
Kilkey, Majella (2010) Men and domestic labor: a missing link in the global care chain. Men and Masculinities 13(1): 126–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184x10382884
King, Kendall A. (2016) Language policy, multilingual encounters, and transnational families. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 37(7): 726–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2015.1127927
Ladegaard, Hans J. (2012) The discourse of powerlessness and repression: identity construction in domestic helper narratives. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16(4): 450–582. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2012.00541.x
Ladegaard, Hans J. (2013) Demonising the cultural Other: legitimising dehumanisation of foreign domestic helpers in the Hong Kong Press. Discourse, Context and Media 2(3): 131–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcm.2013.06.002
Ladegaard, Hans J. (2015) Coping with trauma in domestic migrant worker narratives: linguistic, emotional and psychological perspectives. Journal of Sociolinguistics 19(2): 189–221. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12117
Lazar, Michelle (2000) Gender, discourse and semiotics: the politics of parenthood representations. Discourse and Society 11(3): 373–400. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926500011003005
Lorente, Beatriz (2010) Packaging English-speaking products: maid agencies in Singapore. In Helen Kelly-Holmes and Gerlinde Mautner (eds) Language and the Market 44–55. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-29692-3_5
Lorente, Beatriz (2016) Language-in-education policies and mobile citizens. In Suresh Canagarajah (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language 486–501. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315754512-28
Lorente, Beatriz (2018) Scripts of Servitude: Language, Labor Migration and transnational Domestic Work. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2018-0004
Martin Rojo, Luisa (2017) Neoliberalism and linguistic governmentality. In James W. Tollefson and Miguel Pérez-Milans (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Language Policy and Planning 544–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190458898.013.28
Milani, Tommaso (2012) Language ideology and public discourse. In Carol A. Chapelle (ed.) Wiley Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics 1–7. Oxford: Wiley.
Parreñas, Rhacel (2000) Migrant Filipina domestic workers and the international division of reproductive labor. Gender and Society 14(4): 560–81. https://doi.org/10.1177/089124300014004005
Pavlenko, Aneta (2001) Bilingualism, gender, and ideology. The International Journal of Bilingualism 5(2): 117–51.
Piller, Ingrid (2001) Private language planning: The best of both worlds? Estudios de Sociolingüística 2(1): 61–80.
Piller, Ingrid and Pavlenko, Aneta (2007) Globalization, gender, and multilingualism. In Helene Decke-Cornill and Laurenz Volkmann (eds) Gender Studies and Foreign Language Teaching 15–30. Tubingen: Narr.
Schwartz, Adam (2006) The teaching and culture of household Spanish: understanding racist reproduction in ‘domestic’ discourse. Critical Discourse Studies 3(2): 107–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405900600908079
Stephenson, Wesley (2014) Is London really France’s ‘sixth biggest city’? BBC Magazine (1 April 2014). Retrieved 11 January 2018 from www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26823489.
Urciuoli, Bonnie (2008) Skills and selves in the new workplace. American Ethnologist 35(2): 211–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2008.00031.x
Urciuoli, Bonnie (2016) The compromised pragmatics of diversity. Language and Communication 51: 30–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2016.07.005
Yeoh, Brenda S. A. and Soco, Maria Andrea (2014) The cosmopolis and the migrant domestic worker. Cultural geographies 21(2): 171–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014520899
Published
2019-10-17
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Vessey, R. (2019). Domestic work = language work? Language and gender ideologies in the marketing of multilingual domestic workers in London. Gender and Language, 13(3), 314–338. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.35581
