Escaping domestic worker servitude through Finnish-language acquisition: Upward mobility, governmentality, and the Filipina care worker

With the marketing of Filipina migrant domestic workers (MDWs) as supermaids who exhibit an astounding capacity to acquire foreign languages (Lorente 2012, 2018), institutional discursive constructions of this group draw heavily on state-level representations of Overseas Foreign Workers (OFWs), which portray this population as heroic global workers with the work ethic and skills necessary to conquer any foreign employment challenge with a smile (Guevarra 2010). Such representations constitute a Filipino-specific form of racialized labor that foreign employers, too, may perpetuate (Hess 2021). As the majority of female OFWs engage in care work, a gendered component that portrays them as intrinsically nurturing and maternal also features prominently (Tinio 2013). These discourses directly serve Filipino state interests; remittances from OFWs regularly comprise 8% or more of the country’s annual GDP (Mapa 2024).

Recognizing the ubiquity of these state and institution-level discourses, this study examines – through a series of semi-structured interviews and focus groups with twenty Hong Kong-based Filipina domestic workers – the normalization of these subjectivities in their everyday discursive conceptualizations of themselves. This paper limits analysis to that collected prior to a sub-group of four participants’ departure for a nurse training program in Finland, for which they have qualified by passing the A2-level Finnish-language exam. It also draws on follow-up interview data with the same four participants collected two years subsequent to their relocation to Finland. They envision their nationality and sex as resources that position themselves for success, illustrating the productive potential of governmentality (Rampton & Charalambous 2020) in general. Moreover, their valuation of Finnish based on its promise for upward social mobility suggests the role of linguistic governmentality in particular (Martín Rojo 2018).