Dr Kate Houlden
Senior Lecturer in English Literature

Research area(s)

• World Literature
• Queer Theory
• Materialist Feminism
• Contemporary Fiction
• Caribbean Literature
• Postcolonial Writing

Research Interests

Kate's next book analyses a range of post-millennial fiction in order to demonstrate how the capitalist world-system is structurally reliant on gendered, sexual and narrative compliance with normative understandings of (re)productivity. It covers a range of texts from Asia, the Middle East, America, Britain and the African continent, spanning 2000-present, a period when the fault lines of global capitalism have become increasingly apparent. Countering the prolific and often politically neutered use of the term neoliberalism, this book’s selected novels and short stories illustrate forcefully, and in specific detail, how the exploitation and control of women and LGBTQI+ individuals’ social reproductive labour – the daily work of sustaining and creating the emotional and physical needs of life outside of that which capital is willing to pay for – has been at the heart of the neoliberal juncture. Although the monograph makes clear the ways in which gendered non-conformity and queerness have variously been contained, harnessed, or made tragic in the service of maintaining the next generation of labour power, it also outlines the radical and dissenting energies emerging from the terrain of social reproduction. Consequently, Female Migrant Domestic Workers in Post-Millennial Global Fiction makes a critical intervention in discussions of women’s work within contemporary culture at precisely the moment when rising inequality, looming environmental catastrophe and the ongoing effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have brought questions of gendered and sexualised labour dramatically to the fore.

To make its case, Female Migrant Domestic Workers in Post-Millennial Global Fiction focuses on migrant female domestic workers – queer(ed) cleaners and nannies – those tens of millions of economically enforced labourers from peripheral nations who have left their homes, travelling within or across borders, to conduct caring duties elsewhere. Appearing with surprising fictive frequency, minimal scholarship has analysed the spate of contemporary texts featuring such women, whom Benita Parry chides postcolonial critics for ‘forgetting’ in their rush to celebrate diaspora (2004: 73). These workers’ precarious positionality provides ample illustration of broader gendered and sexual trends, including the way that labour has been ‘globalized and feminized’ (Lewis 2016: 89). In fact, some researchers have gone so far as to link the global voyaging of domestic workers to the ‘revival’ of interest in the very concept of social reproduction (Rosen and Newberry 2018: 120). Certainly, their habitation of customarily feminised roles, combined with a presence in allegedly private, familial space, renders visible the crisis of care underpinning contemporary capitalism (Fraser July-August 2016). Moreover, the challenges faced by migrant women in conforming to normative sexual and domestic codes, including frequent separation from their own children and difficulties in cohabiting with a partner or maintaining a conventional love life, amplify ‘the subversive potential of domestic labor struggles’ (Bergeron 2015: 1). The book’s global focus also allows for an accounting of racialised capitalism in relation to social reproductive labour for, as Zhivka Valiavicharska cautions, home, family, domestic and care work have ‘acquired different political meanings and social value in communities surviving slavery, racist oppression and violence, and various regimes of racial and social control’ (2020: npag). In short, Female Migrant Domestic Workers in Post-Millennial Global Fiction investigates the cultural representation of how migrant maids are made (and how they attempt to remake themselves) at the nexus of global capitalism’s gendered, sexual and racialised ideologies. Despite the specificities of their narratives, my chosen texts nevertheless reveal the fault lines in understanding all women’s work.

Grants