Home Cooking: Filipino Women and Geographies of the Senses in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper considers how migrant women become embodied subjects in foreign cities. It draws on the experiences of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong, and their active creation of places in the city that emulate a ‘sense’ of home (through sights, sounds, tastes, aromas and so on). Rather than explicate extreme forms of bodily experience some women mediate in their working lives - such as physical containment, hunger or violence - I interrogate unconventional forms of body politics that take place outside Hong Kong homes. In examining spaces of the city where Filipinas engage in mass leisure activities, I shed light on the relationship between space, bodies and sensory experience. The senses are not merely an intrinsic property of the body - they are a situated practice that connects the body to overlapping spaces of power in the cultural economy of labour migration. By linking sensory experience to urban culture and power relations in the city, I offer alternative maps of people and places that tell us something different about diasporic experience and the political importance of geographies of the senses.