Un/Identifying reflexive subjects: The case of women in paid domestic work in Mexico

Abstract

Spanish

French

Theories of reflexive modernization are still at the centre of a heated debate regarding the possibilities of social transformation through agency and the reflexive capacity of individuals to work on themselves through the construction of their own biographies and certainties. However, when it comes to identifying reflexivity in the lived experiences of individuals, the issue becomes more complex since this enterprise greatly depends on the way people engage with narratives of the self. This article explores reflexivity and processes of individualization in the lived experiences of paid domestic workers and women employers in Mexico. The article also analyses the way academic work has identified reflexivity among workers. Even though the term ‘reflexivity’ has not specifically being used, studies have often demonstrated the way domestic workers reflexively engage with processes of individualization. The article argues that there are important methodological challenges when it comes to identifying reflexivity through narratives of the self. The context of an interview, the subjectivities of the researcher and participants’ own subject position might all be factors that enable or obstruct the production of those narratives and therefore have an effect on the visibility of processes of individualization in the lived experiences of individuals.

Keywords

Mexico narratives of the self paid domestic work reflexive modernity reflexivity

Introduction

No other group of women has been so widely used as the prototype of difference than women in domestic service. As James Clifford notes, ‘servants have always performed the chore of representing “the people” – lower classes and different races’ (Clifford, 1988 in Stoler, 1995: 149). This seems to be the case of Mexico as in 2011, the National Council for the Prevention of Discrimination (CONAPRED) identified paid domestic workers as one of the 12 groups most vulnerable to discrimination. This article explores reflexive modernity and individualization in the context of paid domestic work in Mexico. It builds on academic research on paid domestic work that has shown the way workers engage with processes of individualization, especially those involved in unions and political movements at both national and international levels. The article argues that, when it comes to looking at reflexivity through narratives of the self, there are important methodological challenges that need to be addressed. As the article shows, the context of an interview, the way participants perceive the researchers’ subjectivities and their own are all factors that shape the narratives that are used to distinguish (or not) processes of reflexive individualization in the lived experiences of people, in this case women employers and domestic workers.

This article draws from qualitative research carried out in 2008 in the city of Irapuato, Guanajuato, Mexico. The study involved 26 women participants that were either domestic service employers or workers. Ten unstructured interviews were conducted with the participation of domestic workers and six with female employers. In addition, two group interviews were conducted; the first with seven domestic workers and the second one with three female employers. Interviews were complemented with participant observation at domestic workers’ communities and at middle-class children’s parties, which domestic workers usually attend with their employers. The age range of workers interviewed was from 22 to 72 years old. Only three of the workers interviewed were married and the rest where single and heads of households. Half of the interviewees had children. In the case of women in households that employed a domestic worker, the age range was from 27 to 80 years old. All employers were married and all had children. Only one of the employers was involved in paid work at the time of the interview. None of the employers interviewed was in a contractual arrangement or knew the workers that participated in the study.

Situated in the centre of Mexico, Guanajuato is one of the 31 states of the Mexican Republic and is itself divided into 46 municipalities, among them Irapuato, where the study was conducted. Guanajuato has a population of 5,787,919 inhabitants of whom approximately 110,278 women are domestic workers; representing up to 11.79% of women in the labour market. Only 2546 domestic workers have health benefits as part of their labour agreement and 34.3% work between 35 and 48 hours per week (ENOE, 2014). The state of Guanajuato presents an interesting site to investigate the experiences of women in paid domestic work because it is one of the most important sources of international immigration in the country (INEGI, 2010). The complex history of its social composition allows us to understand the way this particular occupation has been racialized since colonial times, as Guanajuato was one of the most important destinations for black slaves brought to the region during the sixteenth and seventeenth century (Guevara Sanginés, 2001). It was within this sector where blacks and mulatto women were found both as slaves and as waged labourers during colonial times and after (Valdés, 1987).

This article is divided into three sections. The first section explores the various definitions and debates around notions and theories of reflexive modernity. In particular, the section looks at critiques of processes of reflexivity and individualization for overestimating the power of agency over structure and argues that it is important to understand how those processes could be identified through narratives of the self and the methodological challenges that are involved. The second section briefly examines the literature on paid domestic work in Latin America and argues that, although there are no examples of works that specifically look at reflexivity, some articles do so indirectly by exploring workers’ narratives and processes of subjection that entail a reflexive account of the self. The third and final section looks into the narratives of middle-class women employers and domestic workers. The section argues that traditional norms regarding cleanliness, motherhood and childrearing shaped the way employers were able (or not) to occupy certain subject positions and to reflexively work on themselves. While some employers reflexively worked on themselves and were able to make choices according to what was right for them, others engaged in narratives of individualization while accommodating traditional gendered and classed norms. Narratives of the self were more apparent among employers than workers; perhaps because workers privileged stories that accounted for the structural conditions that shaped their biographies. However, this section shows how processes of reflexivity and individualization were also found among workers, in some cases through narratives of the self, but in others, through stories about detraditionalization or resistance. Finally, the article concludes that when exploring reflexivity and individualization through narratives of the self it is important to question how and when those narratives are produced before assuming that those processes are absent in the lived experiences of individuals, in this case, paid domestic workers.

Reflexivity, individualization and the production of narratives of the self

There is no straightforward consensus regarding the exact meaning of reflexive modernity. However, there are three noticeable and interrelated theses regarding social life: an increased capacity for reflexivity; the demise of tradition of the social in relation to the rules of modernity; and individualization whereby people are now compelled to create themselves as individuals (Heaphy, 2007; Kenway and McLeod, 2004). Lash (1994) has defined two forms of reflexivity: one is self-reflexivity, generally understood as a process in which people reflect on their biographical projects through increasing self-monitoring, so ‘we are not what we are, but what we make of ourselves’ (Giddens, 1991: 75). The other form is structural reflexivity, which is concerned with the capacity of agents to reflect on the conditions of their existence, both on the rules and resources of social structure and in so doing invent their own certainties.

Reflexive modernization has generally been understood as a theory of the ever-increasing power of agency over structure; as such, it has been described as a ‘teleology of self-mastery’ (Adams, 2003). However, there are differences in the way reflexivity has been conceived. For instance, Beck seems to distance himself from the idea that reflexivity is about choice-biography, acknowledging that individuals are compelled to be reflexive and work on themselves in order to negotiate structural fragmentation and uncertainty (Woodman, 2009). Lash (1994) suggests reflexive modernization is not so much the freeing of agency, but the appearance of new conditions that force agency to be free from rule bound ‘Fordist’ structures in the name of capital accumulation. As such, individuals are not so dependent on their position across modes of production, but on access to modes of communication and information. Following this argument, Lash (1994) questions the appearance of reflexivity in some places and economic sectors and not in others and then goes on to suggest that there are ‘reflexivity winners’ and ‘reflexivity losers’ in today’s class-unconscious and class-polarized society. Lash asks whether ‘vulnerable’ subjects (he uses the example of a single mother in an urban ghetto) have the resources to be ‘reflexive’ and, therefore, to self-construct their own ‘life narratives’.

Critics of reflexive modernization have highlighted the limits of agency for social transformation and the way those limits are socially differentiated (Jamieson, 1999; Lash, 1994; Smart and Neale, 1999) Skeggs (2013: 20) suggests that class-based differences are crucial in shaping the extent to which individuals participate in self-created processes. She argues that perspectives around reflexivity depend on ‘the access to, discourse and cultural resources, and the techniques and practices necessary for producing, but also knowing a self’. Some have highlighted the tendency to neglect the improvised and survival character of the reflexive subject, misleading policy makers and researchers into believing that class, gender and other structural differences have actually dissolved (Brannen and Nilsen, 2005; Roberts, 2012; Trujano Ruiz, 2009, 2011). For Farrugia (2013: 293), reflexive modernization theory lacks a theory of the subject that accounts for the way in which reflexive subjectivities actually engage with social structures. Using Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and field, the author argues that reflexivity is continuous with the dispositions of the habitus and operates according to a practical intelligibility. In other words, the way subjects think about ‘what is possible for them and of who they are in relation to the world’.

To put it simply, ‘habitus’ is a product of history and as such it is an open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures. The field structures or conditions the habitus to the extent that it provides for its realization. As such, the roots of a divided habitus may lie in a discrepancy between fields (Bourdieu, 1990). More than a decade ago, McNay (1999: 111) suggested that it was through such discrepancy that reflexivity manifested itself as a piecemeal, discontinuous affair, ‘arising from the negotiation of discrepancies by individuals in their movement within and across fields of social action’.

For some, reflexivity is a social practice found among the privileged; some have even considered it to be a form of cultural capital (Mitchell and Green, 2002; Thomson, 2000; Threadgold and Nilan, 2009). For Adams (2006: 523), working-class and marginal youth lose out ‘in relation to reflexivity because they are marginalized by a social structure which empowers reflexivity in others’. Similarly, when looking at the experiences of young mothers, McDermott and Graham (2005: 76; emphasis added) suggests that although these women ‘reflexively’ construct ‘their own life narratives, they do this within the confines of very real structural inequalities and discursive limitations. Thus, there are constraints on the choices young, working-class mothers can make about identities.’ Bauman (2005: 86) also emphasizes the issue of choices, arguing that ‘all of us are doomed to the life of choices, but not all of us have the means to be choosers’.

However, other studies have shown the way processes of reflexivity and individualization are found among both middle- and working-class youth. According to these studies, youth reflexively resist or accommodate to traditional notions around their classed or gendered selves according to the new requirements of the educational and/or labour market (see Kenway et al., 2006; Reay et al., 2005; Walkerdine et al., 2001). For instance, Farrugia (2011: 762) looks at the identities of young people experiencing homelessness and argues that young people’s subjectivities are outcomes of an intersection between institutional and structural processes. For the author, these processes are given meaning through individualistic discourses, that is, by ‘stressing the importance of personal responsibility as a crucial moral characteristic of their identities’. Thus, the author identifies narratives that describe the movement into homelessness as a personal/individual failure and narratives describing movements out of homelessness as an outcome of personal strength.

In a detraditionalized world, structural insecurity compels the construction of individualized, reflexive subjectivities. In the absence of collective structures on which to draw for identity and material support, young people feel personally responsible for events in their lives that are the outcome of structural processes.

Whether we link reflexivity to the way people consciously chose what is ‘right for them’ or as a reaction to structural processes and uncertainty, the term implies the capacity of individuals to work on themselves and this in itself raises important methodological questions. Empirical studies of reflexivity often draw on qualitative research mainly through interviews (Bhat and Rather, 2013; Gilbert et al., 2013; Laughland-Booÿ et al., 2014; McDermott and Graham, 2005). However, as Byrne (2003: 33) argues, ‘not all individuals are able to present themselves at all times as coherent, whole subjects of a storied narrative’ in the context of an interview. The author warns that processes of subjection remain under-theorized and that there is as much to learn from cases where individuals have difficulty producing a story of the self as those where they produce a storied narrative with ease.

Empirical studies of reflexivity must question why, when and where researchers identify reflexivity among individuals’ narratives when these are produced in a context of an interview. Not only the context of the interview but also the subjectivities ascribed to the researcher could impact the process of narration and therefore such factors must be analysed as part of the narrative text (Davids and Willemse, 2014; Nencel, 2014; Van Stapele, 2014). Calls for a reflexive analysis of individuals’ capacity to work on themselves are still important methodological challenges to be addressed; especially when looking at individuals whose biographies seem to be shaped by structural conditions (i.e. poverty) that are straightforwardly identified as limiting when it comes to making choices; such as the case of women in paid domestic work.

‘The issue pertains to me’: Academic research, reflexivity and paid domestic work

The increasing academic interest in paid domestic work in Mexico and Latin America has covered the discussion of many important dimensions of the occupation, especially during the last decade (see Brites [2013] for an extensive literature review). Although there is no academic research that specifically engages with the issue of reflexive modernity in the context of paid domestic work, there are some that indirectly do so by looking at workers’ narratives and the way they incorporate conscious work on the self. For instance, Bernardino-Costa (2011) looks at unionized domestic workers in Brazil and their contribution to the decolonization of knowledge. Through their political participation and alliance with black, union and feminists movements, domestic workers produced discourses from the starting point of the coloniality of power, that is, the survival of colonial legacies into modern times. For Bernardino-Costa (2011: 37, emphasis added), the narratives that emerge from workers’ movements are border thinking as they incorporate the dual consciousness of a modern/colonial world-system.

The domestic workers’ narrative is produced from another perspective and configured as a reaction to the oppression, exploitation and domination that are legitimized by that narrative. This reaction is border thinking – the struggle of subaltern reasoning to make its potential primary and break down sacralized hierarchies based on race, class, gender and knowledge.

Domestic workers’ resistance to oppression through the formation of alliances implies a reflexive account of who they are within the modern/colonial system. Workers in this particular study were conscious about the way their alliances with feminists, black and union movements might have proved to be ‘ineffective and incomplete if any one of the three dimensions of the triad race, class and gender is set aside’ (Bernardino-Costa, 2011: 42, emphasis added). The author exemplifies this argument through an analysis of a worker’s narrative about her own subject position within the Unified Black Movement (MNU):

I said, well, their language is difficult, I don’t understand almost anything they are saying here – but I know that the issue pertains to me, because they are talking about blacks. And independently of their being PhDs or having a better position than mine as a domestic worker, it related to me because I am black. And so I thought my place was there, and I didn’t leave.

The worker makes similar reflexive accounts of her involvement in the feminist and labour movements. Her narrative shows a process of subjection whereby a certain position (in this case being a black worker and a political subject) is made discursively available for the worker to occupy, even as she acknowledges difference she reflexively accommodates who she is within the movements. Two decades ago, Castro (1993) showed the way domestic workers’ unions represented forms of resistance that allowed workers to produce themselves as political subjects. Current analysis of movements and political alliances makes visible the way such processes occur within an international arena. For instance, Goldsmith (2013) shows how, through their political participation in a transnational context, domestic workers were able to resist ideas that fixed them in ‘their place’ – the silenced space of the home of employers – occupying their own space as active, conscious and counterpublic social actors. For the author, the complex negotiations involved in the 2011 Domestic Workers Convention (No. 189) served as a platform for workers to achieve not only the visibility of their labour conditions and the legitimacy of their demands, but also the acknowledgement of their position as political interlocutors. Studies that look into the international dimension of the domestic workers’ movement highlight the way workers depend on their capacity to negotiate with other political actors and institutions and ‘their potential to interpret reality from a cosmovision, or from an ideological, political, religious and class perspective’ (Valenzuela and Mora, 2009: 301). The relevance of exploring these forms of resistance and production (of workers as political subjects and decolonized knowledge) relies on the need to move beyond the victimization of workers, since ‘the theoretical construction of worker-immigrant-poor-women places the real subject in a reduced status’ as a half-person (Lerussi, 2007: 189).

During the last decade, the literature, both international and national, has illuminated conscious strategies of resistance and self-affirmation among workers. Some studies highlight the way immigrant workers create and use their own social networks to gain financial and emotional support while learning new strategies of negotiation and resistance (Durin et al., 2015; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994). Studies of immigrant workers have also accounted for the way paid domestic work has allowed some women to reflexively work on their gendered and classed selves at home. For instance, Parreñas-Salazar (2001) looks at migrant Filipina domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles and argues that the international migration of women could also be read as a process of rejecting gender constraints at home and as a direct liberation from traditional duties and roles. The feminization of international immigration could be partly explained as a process of individualization; as the way women in developing countries are compelled to be reflexive and work on themselves in the face of new local and global forms of uncertainty.

Similar processes of individualization could be found when looking at a national-level context. For instance, in Bolivia, Lesley Gill (1994) described the increasing dependence of middle-class women on domestic work as they increasingly entered the labour market and showed how Aymara domestic workers consciously capitalized on this dependency to increase their negotiating power with employers. Gill’s work makes visible how some processes of individualization (in this case among middle-class Bolivian women) might be linked to others or have some sort of domino effect. While acknowledging the structural conditions that compelled women into domestic services, some academic works highlight the way workers engage with narratives of individualization where the pride and empowerment of earning a salary allows them to construct themselves as independent women (Gutiérrez Gómez and Rosas Flores, 2010) and invest in who they are and who they can become through education (Betânia Ávila, 2013).

Identifying reflexivity among women whose biographies might be perceived as too constrained by structural conditions could work to resist the coercion of ‘third-world women’ into performing highly scripted identities, usually not of their choosing (Mohanty, 1991). Critically engaging with narratives of the self requires acknowledging the way the textual representations of social subjects involve the construction and not merely the description of social reality (Suaréz Navaz and Hernández Castillo, 2008). The next section looks at how employers and paid domestic work engage (or not) with narratives of the self that facilitate the visibility of processes of individualization among this particular group of women.

Identifying reflexivity among middle-class employers and domestic workers in Mexico: Whose narratives count?

The employers

When exploring reflexivity and individualization among employers’ narratives it was possible to distinguish how classed and gendered norms marked the way women consciously engaged with the ‘design’ of their own biographies and lifestyles. Women employers felt able to ‘free’ themselves from most of the burden of housework (through the employment of a domestic worker), but some were consciously reflexive about gendered and classed norms regarding cleanliness and their place in the division of housework among members of the family. For instance, Berta, a 52-year-old employer and mother of two, describes a process of change and detraditionalization and the way such a process is linked to the capacity of young women to work on themselves:

[In the past] there was not so much technology, we had nothing to entertain us with, so, you were entertained by doing something at home. Life has become very fast, it demands preparation, and distances are longer. Distances mean that you waste a lot of your time that you could spend doing something more. But now young women, instead of being knitting, or cooking they are at the computer, chatting or playing something … there is not an interest any more for crafts. In the past, the microwave didn’t exist or the washing machine, et cetera. Now, domestic tasks are easier and the interests of young women are focusing on something else, not housework. Even the media tells you that if you don’t clean it is ok, that you should cultivate yourself, intellectually, spiritually.

Berta acknowledges the structural changes in place, changes that facilitate young women to work on themselves but also compel them to adapt to the requirements of the modern world as life now demands preparation or what Berta later calls, a cultivation of the self. The employer identifies these demands as mediated through what Lash (1994) defines as the modes of communication and information that force individuals to be reflexive. Berta goes on to describe moments in her life when she was not able to hire a domestic worker because of her husband’s unemployment. In a way, those moments compelled her to think about what was ‘right for her’ and the way this was deeply linked to her capacity to resist traditional norms around cleanliness and the gendered division of housework:

This has been my case, I was always cleaning, and cleaning and cleaning and they [daughters and husband] were always making a mess. At one moment I thought ‘I am so stressed, and they all live their lives happy and I am unable to do a lot of things because of cleaning’. So I said to myself ‘this has to stop, I feel a lot of stress about the house [being messy] but, that’s it’ so now, I go to my knitting classes, I read a good book. I feel those things are giving me a personal benefit, instead of being cleaning; as no one thanks me for it and, on top of that, they say I am compulsive and perfectionist.

Through her narrative, Berta links processes of individualization to structural changes when she describes modern life and the media’s role regarding a widespread expectation for the cultivation of the self. However, when she describes her own process of individualization, partly compelled by the uncertainty caused by her husband’s unemployment, she stresses what Lash (1994) defines as self-reflexivity, that is, the way people consciously chose their biographical projects through self-monitoring. Berta vividly describes the way she works on the self when she says this has to stop; somehow she has to convince herself to reflexively engage with practices that provide her with a personal benefit.

The rest of the employers were able to free themselves from housework through employing a domestic worker. Although all employers interviewed had a domestic worker since they were children many of them described the way their mothers taught them the importance of housework; as Gloria, an 80-year-old employer, noted, ‘my mother used to tell us; you must to learn how to do it [housework] before you learn how to command it’. This account shows the way paid domestic work is involved in the reproduction of classed and gendered expectations as women learn, since childhood, ‘their place’ in the home as future employers. However, this account also demonstrates that, for most women employers, freeing themselves from the physical burden of domestic work did not necessarily translate into the ability to engage reflexively with discourses of ‘living one’s own life’, but instead strengthened expectations of ‘being there for others’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995). As McNay (1999) suggests, the destabilizing of conventional gender relations on one level may further entrench conventional patterns of behaviour on other levels. For instance, when asked about a Mexican popular phrase that says ‘the maid is the key to a happy household’, most employers highlighted the fact that domestic workers allowed them to have ‘quality time’ with their children and saved men and children from a distressed, ‘hysterical’ wife/mother. Paid domestic work enables female employers to enjoy the emotional benefits and social status of being mothers while being released from the menial work involved. Monica, a 37-year-old female employer, explained that, in the absence of a domestic worker ‘you are a different mother’:

A friend of mine just moved to the US and she realised that … she has two girls, one is two years old, and the other one is five. The oldest girl told my friend the other day ‘you are like another mom – different from the one we had when we were in Mexico. Here you are all about “Pick it up, clean it up!“ and in Mexico you were never like that, why have you become a different mom?’… it’s like when you have a muchacha [maid] you are a ‘cooler’ mom.

This employer’s perceived need to subcontract domestic work is deeply entangled with notions that define a ‘good’ mother as emotionally connected, permissive and unstressed. Although classed privileges must be acknowledged when looking at the possibilities of ‘knowing’ and ‘producing’ a self, we must also distinguish between the self that is told and the life that is lived (Steedman, 2000 in Byrne, 2003: 32). By the time of the interview, Amanda, a 27 year-old employer and mother, had recently resigned from a job that she loved after what she described to be one of her worst experiences with a domestic worker. In this case, the employer found her female worker with another woman in the ‘service’ room, and she fired her. According to the employer, both women were fully clothed but were lying in bed holding one another. The employer thought the domestic worker was a lesbian and she asked her to leave as she could be a bad ‘example’ to her daughter. After that, the employer felt forced to quit a job she loved; at the same time she paradoxically engaged with reflexive accounts regarding women’s entailment to work on themselves and decide over their own biographies:

I think that if women feel fulfilled by doing so [not working] it’s ok. If they feel fulfilled going to tennis lessons in the morning and then for breakfast while having a domestic worker doing all at home, it’s ok. If they feel fulfilled by cooking all morning so that when their husband comes home he applauds them, then it’s ok. If she feels fulfilled by going to the office it’s ok.

As the employer continues with this particular narrative, it is possible to visualize the constraints placed upon such processes, as structural conditions seem to mediate her own process of individualization:

That is what my husband helped me to understand because before, when I would come to the office and leave my child I would cry and he would say to me ‘what do you prefer, that our daughter would have a bitter mother or one that feels fulfilled?’ … however, my late experience with Carmen [the domestic worker] came to ruin everything for me, because he [the husband] became paranoid when he used to be more trustful.

As moral discourses are deeply entangled with ideas of purity the worker’s imagined ‘deviant’ sexuality seems to define her as a threat to the moral integrity of the home and the child. Collins (2000) argues that for racism and heterosexism the point of deviance is created by a normalized white heterosexuality whose meaning depends on a deviant black (in this case non-white) sexuality. In this case, it is possible to distinguish between the self that is told and the life that is lived. Thus, while Amanda’s narrative could be interpreted as reflexive, and she consciously engages with processes of individualization, it is possible to see how social expectations regarding sexuality and childrearing shaped the extent to which she could be reflexive (enough) about her own biography and act upon it. Access to material and discursive resources to consciously work on the self must not be interpreted as straightforward conditions that allow or shape processes of individualization. For instance, Ana Maria, a 46-year-old employer and mother of four, talks about what seems to be a social expectation for individualization that clashes with traditional norms regarding motherhood and childrearing. The employer consciously accommodates such norms:

When my children were little, I would take them to school and then I would go to the supermarket and every day the same thing. I felt sometimes that my life, like my life was missing something, I was not doing anything extraordinary … you realize the value of that when you see your children [grew up] mature, responsible, good … now I think all I did was worth it. But there was a time when I was in a crisis, I had mixed feelings and then people tell you ‘you are always in the house, have a job or take an English lesson or something’ … I think it was worth it, for the children.

As McNay (1999) suggests, reflexivity is not the evenly generalized capacity of subjects living in a detraditionalized era but arises unevenly from how deeply they are embedded within differing sets of power relations. Class privilege might work to free employers from the burden and time that housework requires while strengthening other dimensions/sets of power relations and discourses, in this case, notions of ‘good’ mothering. As Adkins (2002) argues, when looking at reflexivity and the possibilities of gender transformation, caution must be exercised when overestimating the freeing of agency over structure, as the deconstruction of some gendered rules and norms could be replaced by the reworking of others.

A reworking of gender norms might be a discontinuous process that affects women differently. Adkins’ argument could be used to question the way reflexivity works, and, as the above accounts show, how processes of individualization are not always facilitated by structural conditions and class privilege. The capacity of individuals to work on the self within a particular set of power relations might paradoxically work to make certain subject positions more difficult to transform.

The workers

A careful analysis of the narratives of middle-class employers and workers shows that employers seem to produce and engage with narratives of the self more frequently than workers. It was, therefore, easier to explore processes of individualization where employers reflexively resisted or accommodated to traditional norms or chose what was ‘best for them’ while constructing their own biographies and lifestyles. The narratives of the workers were more often shaped by descriptions of how structural constraints shaped their biographies.

As mentioned previously, individuals might have different capacities or priorities when it comes to presenting themselves as whole subjects in the context of an interview. Narratives might well depend on the social context in which they are produced (Byrne, 2003). My own subject position as a middle-class woman, employer and researcher might have influenced the narratives of both employers and workers. For instance, during a group interview, when I asked employers to describe the reasons, priorities and processes for deciding who to employ, one of the participants stated: ‘well, we are sociologists of the house!’ By making reference to my position as a sociologist they highlighted the way our subject positions were shared in various dimensions. However, employers might have also prioritized narratives of the self as a way to justify their privileged position as employers of domestic workers that were sometimes as young as 12 years old. In contrast to employers, workers might have lived the interview from a different context, not only influenced by my own subject position but also by the theme of the interview – the work they do. Workers might have been influenced by what Steedman calls ‘enforced narratives’, that is, those that involve ‘a history of expectations’ rather than urges and desires (Steedman, 2000: 28 in Byrne, 2003: 32). Workers might have prioritized the production of narratives of complaint instead of those about self, following an expectation over the potential of the study to make their demands visible and, therefore, improve their labour conditions. Understanding why and how individuals present themselves raises important methodological questions about reflexivity (Adkins, 2002; Byrne, 2003; Skeggs, 2002). However, in some cases, reflexive processes of individualization were easily recognized within a narrative. For instance, during a group interview, Ana reflected on who she was and how the occupation allowed her to become:

Working doesn’t make me a better or a worse person, but I feel more free, I have more freedom to spend, not because I need to, but because I want to and I have the means to do it. He [husband] works and I work and I feel that whatever I earn is mine. His money, well, he needs to provide and pay for our living expenses. Of course, if we need something for the house I also contribute with my money to cover what we might need.

As Jubas (2007: 237) argues, terms such as ‘citizen-consumer’ indicate the extent to which consumption and citizenship are now deeply interwoven. Through paid work, women increase their power as consumers as globalization has moved ‘the primary site of identity construction for both women and men from production to consumption’. For Jubas, global portability and technology have increasingly undermined citizens’ place in production and ‘groups other than traditional classes are asserting themselves and being identified by marketers eager to advance their brands and products in the marketplace’. Thus, the workers’ assertion of their position as consumers is also an assertion about who they are in the world. Women have often advocated for their citizenship rights through consumer rights; precisely because consumption has historically been defined as women’s activity. As Hearn and Roseneil (1999: 5) argue, consumption is still ‘one of the major ways in which social and societal inequality is experienced’. Not surprisingly, workers’ buying power allows them to define themselves as freer and to reflexively engage with who they are and what they want to become, as even intimate experiences such as pregnancy and motherhood have been increasingly commodified, to the extent that successful mothers are now defined as those who buy more and buy better (Douglas and Michaels, 2004). Similarly, during the same group interview, Elena, a 32-year- old live-in worker, resists gendered notions regarding paid work and states:

There was one guy that asked me to stop working, he said he would send me money [I said] ‘you don’t have to pay for my stuff, I like working and I want to keep working’ and in my mind, if one day I marry, I will find the way to keep working because you get used to having your own money to buy what you want.

As Heaphy (2007) suggests, self-reflexivity may have more to do with conflicting demands that are made on people’s biographies than with reflexive democratic relationships at home. However, as Elena’s narrative shows, although all workers were conscious of the structural conditions that ‘forced’ them into the occupation, such as lack of education, they were reflexive about what paid work allowed them to be. Again, the issue of consumption appears deeply linked to who they are and the way they consciously plan to assert who they are in the future. Elena’s narrative was echoed by her sister, Monica, as she noted how ‘things have changed; we have become more self-sufficient’. Again, a processes of detraditionalization is closely linked to the way women consciously engage with work on the self as they become more self-sufficient. It is interesting to note that narratives where reflexivity was easily distinguishable were produced within the context of group interviews, both in the case of employers and workers; something that supports Steedman’s (2000) suggestion about the importance of the context when attempting to understand and make sense of narratives.

Workers were reflexive about who they were in relation to structural norms and conditions that shaped their biographies, especially those regarding poverty and the lack of educational opportunities. Many workers were conscious about the way traditional norms, especially around sexuality, shaped their biographies but they also highlighted how things have changed; that is, indirectly they described a process of detraditionalization and the way they saw themselves within it. When Raquel, a 37-year-old worker and mother of four, explained why she never talked to anyone about her experiences of sexual assault while working, she consciously reflects about how tradition shaped who she was, in comparison with who she has become:

I never told anyone, but I am telling you now, I never said anything, not my sisters or brothers, or my mother or friends. I felt ashamed, I don’t know, my father and mother never said a word [about sexuality]. I was 14 when I had my first menstruation, I was so scared that [she cleaned herself with] some alcohol! In those days they never talked to you about anything, every time my mother had a baby [Raquel is one of 12], my mother always had homebirths, she would locked herself in the room, and they used to tell us that a woman came to the house with a baby on a little haversack and she gave the baby to my mother … nowadays, young women know everything.

By consciously and vividly describing the way things were in those days, Raquel is able to identify how traditional norms shaped her biography, but this also implies a break with the past that says something about who she is now. During the interviews, workers described the way structural conditions shaped their biographies, but by consciously doing so, they produced narratives that accounted for the way women were able to resist, negotiate and engage in processes of individualization as they asserted their right to define themselves and who they were. For instance, Rosario describes how one day she confronted an employer that fired her without justification and refused to pay her for a day’s work:

She started to insult me and I said ‘no, señora, you are not going to talk to me like that, pay me and I leave’ and she said to me ‘well, I’ll pay you, you are only a gata [cat]’¹ … I wanted to cry right there, I had a knot in my throat, but I said to myself ‘I won’t cry [in front of her]’ and then she said ‘you know what, I won’t pay you’ … ‘you better pay me because you are being unfair, and you will remember me if you don’t’ [Rosario said] and then she threw down the 50 pesos note on the floor, and I didn’t pick it up, I needed it more than her but I didn’t pick it up and I said to her ‘I won’t pick it up, you have to give it to me in the hand’; ‘who do you think you are?’ [the employer asked] and I said ‘well, a woman with a lot of needs, poor, I don’t know how you see me’ and she said ‘like a muerta de hambre’, ‘may be’ I said ‘but I came to earn this money with the sweat of my brow’. How ungrateful they can be [employers] I never went back (pause) but I didn’t pick it up.

The literal translation of muerta de hambre is someone who is so poor that they are dying of hunger. It is an insult and somehow implies personal responsibility for the failure to provide for oneself. Just as in Farrugia’s (2011) work, where young people experiencing homeless felt personally responsible for events in their lives (through individualized discourses), this worker’s class condition was defined by the employer as a personal failure, instead of the outcome of structural processes. It is interesting to note the way Rosario responds to such a definition of herself: she simultaneously acknowledges personal responsibility when she replies may be but then asserts the moral character of what she does and who she is when she notes I came to earn this money with the sweat of my brow, making reference to personal effort and achievement. Rosario refuses to collect the money from the floor, she consciously resists this humiliation. Even if the worker needs the money, somehow she knows that picking it up defines her. As Nussbaum (2006) argues, humiliation is about publicly exposing someone to shame and to mark the subject as low status.

As the experiences of both employers and workers show, there is as much to learn in cases where the self is easily produced through a narrative as from those where individuals privilege other dimensions and, therefore, do not engage easily with stories of the self. As this section shows, the context of an interview might shape the way individuals, in this case women, engage or not with narratives about who they are or who they have become. Therefore, when exploring processes of reflexivity, we must look at the diverse and complex ways in which individuals engage and produce their own narratives. The availability of discourses for individuals to occupy certain subject positions might not always be easily distinguishable, however caution must be exercised before interpreting this as an absence. At the same time, narratives where individualized discourses are distinguishable do not necessarily imply the freeing of agency over structure or the ability of certain (often class-privileged) individuals to work on themselves and design their own biographies and lifestyles. As this study has shown, structural conditions still shape the process of detraditionalization that theories of reflexive modernity describe and these conditions include, but are not limited to, access to resources. Classed and gendered traditional notions still play an important role in the construction of individualized, reflexive subjectivisms, both in the case of women who are employers and those who are workers.

Conclusion

Identifying reflexivity through narratives of the self is a complex enterprise if reflexivity is understood as the freeing of agency over structure or as the way uncertainty and fragmentation compel individuals to work on themselves. The task is even more complicated if one questions, for instance, how individualization occurs among differently positioned subjects since these processes are constructed through narratives of the self that are not always evenly accessible to individuals.

For more than a decade, academic research on paid domestic work in Latin America has shown the way unionized workers have come to occupy subject positions that were previously denied to them; workers have resisted the discursive colonialism that fixed them in highly scripted biographies and instead they have come to occupy their own space as active and conscious political actors. Behind doors, workers have also made sense of who are they in the world and have acted accordingly, engaging with strategies of negotiation with employers and resisting traditional gendered norms at home. Through the narratives of middle-class employers and domestic workers in Mexico, this article has shown the way that women who occupy different subject positions engage with processes of individualization that do not necessary entail resistance, but a reflexive working on the self and a sense of who they are in the world.

The article has also shown the way that identifying reflexive subjects through interviewing might pose serious methodological challenges. The context of an interview, the subjectivities ascribed to the researcher, as well as participants’ subject positions, might shape the way people produce (or not) narratives of the self. Therefore, when exploring reflexivity, we must look at the diverse and complex ways in which individuals engage with processes of subjection through narratives. The availability of discourses for individuals to engage with processes of reflexive individualization might not always be easily distinguishable, but an absence of such processes must not be assumed.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Bridget Byrne for her invaluable comments and guidelines throughout the writing of this article. I am ever so grateful to the women in the study who shared their experiences with me. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and very helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the Dirección de Apoyo a la Investigación y al Posgrado (DAIP) at the Universidad de Guanajuato, for their language editing services.

Funding

This research was supported by the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) in Mexico.

Notes

Author biography

Abril Saldaña-Tejeda is currently a lecturer at the Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico and holds an honorary fellowship at the University of Manchester until February 2017. Her research interests include the sociology of the body, gender, mestizaje and racism. She has published work on motherhood, sexuality and the sociology of food in the context of paid domestic work in Mexico as well as ecofeminism and sustainable development. Her current research concerns motherhood and how genomic medicine contests or reinforces notions about gender, national identity and race in Mexico.

References

Adams

(2003) The reflexive self and culture: a critique. The British Journal of Sociology 54(2): 221–238.

Adams

(2006) Hybridizing habitus and reflexivity: Towards and understanding of contemporary identity. Sociology 40(3): 511–528.

Adkins

(2002) Reflexivity and the politics of qualitative research. In: May

(ed.) Qualitative Research in Action. London: Sage, pp. 332–348.

Bauman

(2005) Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beck

Beck-Gernsheim

(1995) The Normal Chaos of Love. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bernardino-Costa

(2011) Destabilizing the national hegemonic narrative: The decolonized thought of Brazil’s domestic workers’ unions. Latin American Perspectives 38(5): 33–45.

Betânia Ávila

(2013) Presentación: mesa de discusión sobre trabajo doméstico. Revista de Estudios Sociales 45: 229–232.

Bhat

Rather

(2013) Youth transitions in Kashmir: Exploring the relationships between habitus, ambitions and impediments. South Asia Research 33(3):185–204.

Bourdieu

(1990) In Other Words, trans. Adamson

. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

10.

Brannen

Nilsen

(2005) Individualisation, choice and structure: A discussion of current trends in sociological analysis. The Sociological Review 53(3): 412–428.

11.

Brites

(2013). Domestic work: Issues, literature and policies. Cadernos de Pesquisa 43(149): 422–451.

12.

Byrne

(2003) Reciting the self: Narrative representations of the self in qualitative interviews. Feminist Theory 4(1): 29–49.

13.

Castro

(1993) The alchemy between social categories in the production of political subjects: Class, gender, race and generation in the case of domestic workers’ union leaders in Salvador~Bahia, Brazil. The European Journal of Development Research 5(2): 1–22.

14.

Collins

(2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

15.

Davids

Willemse

(2014) Embodied engagements: Feminist ethnography at the crossing of knowledge production and representation. Women’s Studies International Forum 43: 1–4.

16.

Douglas

Michaels

(2004) The Mommy Myth. New York: Free Press.

17.

Durin

de la

Bastos

(eds) (2015) Trabajadoras en la sombra. Dimensiones del servicio doméstico latinoamericano. México: CIESAS, EGAP/TEC de Monterrey.

18.

ENOE (Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo) (2014) Available at: www.inegi.org.mx/est/contenidos/Proyectos/encuestas/hogares/regulares/enoe/ (accessed 24 February 2015).

19.

Farrugia

(2011) Youth homelessness and individualised subjectivity. Journal of Youth Studies 14(7): 761–775.

20.

Farrugia

(2013) The reflexive subject: Towards a theory of reflexivity as practical intelligibility. Current Sociology 61(3): 283–300.

21.

Giddens

(1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

22.

Gilbert

Farrand

Lankshear

(2013) ‘I don’t want to live like this anymore’: Disrupted habitus in young people ‘at risk’ of diagnosis of personality disorder. Youth and Society 45(3): 347–364.

23.

Gill

(1994) Precarious Dependencies: Gender, Class and Domestic Service in Bolivia. New York: Columbia University Press.

24.

Goldsmith

(2013) Los espacios internacionales de la participación política de las trabajadoras remuneradas del hogar. Revista de Estudios Sociales 45: 233–246.

25.

Guevara Sanginés

(2001) Guanajuato diverso: Sabores y sinsabores de su ser mestizo (Siglos XVI a XVII). Guanajuato: Ediciones la Rana.

26.

Gutiérrez Gómez

Rosas Flores

(2010) Entre muros: 4 testimonios de mujeres indígenas en la ciudad. México: Expresión Cultural Mie Xaam.

27.

Heaphy

(2007) Late Modernity and Social Change: Reconstructing Social and Personal Life. London: Routledge.

28.

Hearn

Roseneil

(1999) Consuming cultures: Power and resistance. In: Hearn

Roseneil

(eds) Consuming Cultures: Power and Resistance. London: Macmillan/New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 1–13.

29.

Hondagneu-Sotelo

(1994) Regulating the unregulated? Domestic workers’ social networks. Social Problems 41(1): 50–64.

30.

INEGI (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía) (2010) Censo de población y vivienda 2010. Available at: www.censo2010.org.mx.

31.

Jamieson

(1999) Intimacy transformed? A critical look at the ‘pure relationship’. Sociology 33(3): 477–494.

32.

Jubas

(2007) Conceptual con/fusion in democratic societies: Understandings and limitations of consumer-citizenship. Journal of Consumer Culture 7(2): 231–254.

33.

Kenway

McLeod

(2004) Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology and ‘spaces of points of view’: Whose reflexivity, which perspective? British Journal of Sociology of Education 25(4): 525–544.

34.

Kenway

Kraack

Hickey-Moodey

(2006) Masculinity Beyond the Metropolis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

35.

Lash

(1994) Reflexivity and its doubles: Structure, aesthetics, community. In: Beck

Giddens

Lash

(eds) Reflexive Modernization. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 110–173.

36.

Laughland-Booÿ

Mayall

Skrbis

(2014) Whose choice? Young people, career choices and reflexivity re-examined. Current Sociology. Epub ahead of print 8 July 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0011392114540671.

37.

Lerussi

(2007) Trabajo doméstico y migraciones de mujeres en Latinoamérica el caso de las nicaragüenses en Costa Rica Punteo para un enfoque de reflexión y acción feministas. Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 33–34: 183–203.

38.

McDermott

Graham

(2005) Resilient young mothering: Social inequalities, late modernity and the ‘problem’ of ‘teenage’ motherhood. Journal of Youth Studies 8(1): 59–79.

39.

McNay

(1999) Gender, habitus and the field: Pierre Bourdieu and the limits of reflexivity. Theory, Culture and Society 16(1): 95–117.

40.

Mitchell

Green

(2002) ‘I’d don’t know what I’d do without our mam’: Motherhood, identity and support networks. The Sociological Review 50(4): 1–22.

41.

Mohanty

(1991) Under western eyes: Feminist scholarship and colonial discourses. In: Mohanty

Russo

Torres

(eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 51–180.

42.

Nencel

(2014) Situating reflexivity: Voices, positionalities and representations in feminist ethnographic texts. Women’s Studies International Forum 43: 75–83.

43.

Nussbaum

(2006) Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

44.

Parreñas-Salazar

(2001) Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

45.

Reay

David

Ball

(2005) Degrees of Choice: Class, Race, Gender and Higher Education. Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham.

46.

Roberts

(2012) One step forward, one step Beck: A contribution to the ongoing conceptual debate in youth studies. Journal of Youth Studies 15(3): 389–401.

47.

Skeggs

(2002) Techniques for telling the reflexive self. In: May

(ed.) Qualitative Research in Action. London: Sage, pp. 349–374.

48.

Skeggs

(2013) Class, Self, Culture. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

49.

Smart

Neale

(1999) Family Fragments? Cambridge: Polity Press.

50.

Solinger

(2005) Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America. New York: New York University Press.

51.

Steedman

(2000) Enforced narratives: Stories of another self. In: Cosslett

Lury

Summerfield

(eds) Feminism and Autobiography: Text, Theories, Methods. London: Routledge, pp. 25–39.

52.

Stoler

(1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

53.

Suárez Navaz

Hernández Castillo

(eds) (2008) Descolonizando el feminismo: teorías y prácticas desde los márgenes. Madrid: Catedra Ediciones.

54.

Thomson

(2000) Dream on: The logic of sexual practice. Journal of Youth Studies 3(4): 407–427.

55.

Threadgold

Nilan

(2009) Reflexivity of contemporary youth, risk and cultural capital. Current Sociology 57(1): 47–68.

56.

Trujano Ruiz

(2009) La reinvención del hombre. Sociológica (México) 24(71): 211–232.

57.

Trujano Ruiz

(2011) Giddens y la ‘individualidad altamente reflexiva’. Argumentos (México, DF) 24(65): 199–225.

58.

Valdés

(1987) The decline of slavery in Mexico. The Americas 44(2): 167–194.

59.

Valenzuela

Mora

(2009) Trabajo doméstico: un largo camino hacia el trabajo decente. Santiago de Chile: Organización Internacional del Trabajo.

60.

Van Stapele

(2014) Intersubjectivity, self-reflexivity and agency: Narrating about ‘self’ and ‘other’ in feminist research. Women’s Studies International Forum 43: 13–21.

61.

Walkerdine

Lucey

Melody

(2001) Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class. New York: New York University Press.

62.

Woodman

(2009) The mysterious case of the pervasive choice biography: Ulrich Beck, structure/agency, and the middling state of theory in the sociology of youth. Journal of Youth Studies 12(3): 243–256.