Review Reports - “Settler Maintenance” and Migrant Domestic Worker Ecologies of Care

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to read, think with, and respond to this manuscript. Drawing on interviews with migrant domestic workers, the author(s) demonstrate how these domestic care-workers navigate and transform relations with toxic chemicals and settler cultures alike. Developing the idea of “settler maintenance,” the author(s) contend that settlers impose toxic regimes of caring on those who they often employ to tend to their domiciles as well as toxic ideologies that support inequality and injustice. This move underscores how caring labor not only sustains particular beings and ways of being into the future, but also how caring labor sustains some ways of thinking-relating into the future rather than others. This point is very interesting and could be further developed. That said, it does not—in my view—contribute substantially to the special issue’s thematic focus on care and the environment. While the author(s) occasionally mention the careworker’s relations to broader environmental phenomena and to the links between toxic chemicals and environmental injustice, these ideas are not developed. They also occasionally tie their analysis to notions of “more-than-human” networks for care, but, again, these ideas are never fully developed. Other scholars, including Puig de la Bellacasa (who they do cite), have taken up these ideas more fully. This essay would have benefited from a more thoroughgoing engagement with this literature. I therefore suggest that the author(s) submit this essay instead to another journal.

Author Response

Comments 1: "Thank you for the opportunity to read, think with, and respond to this manuscript. Drawing on interviews with migrant domestic workers, the author(s) demonstrate how these domestic care-workers navigate and transform relations with toxic chemicals and settler cultures alike. Developing the idea of “settler maintenance,” the author(s) contend that settlers impose toxic regimes of caring on those who they often employ to tend to their domiciles as well as toxic ideologies that support inequality and injustice. This move underscores how caring labor not only sustains particular beings and ways of being into the future, but also how caring labor sustains some ways of thinking-relating into the future rather than others. This point is very interesting and could be further developed. That said, it does not—in my view—contribute substantially to the special issue’s thematic focus on care and the environment. While the author(s) occasionally mention the careworker’s relations to broader environmental phenomena and to the links between toxic chemicals and environmental injustice, these ideas are not developed. They also occasionally tie their analysis to notions of “more-than-human” networks for care, but, again, these ideas are never fully developed. Other scholars, including Puig de la Bellacasa (who they do cite), have taken up these ideas more fully. This essay would have benefited from a more thoroughgoing engagement with this literature. I therefore suggest that the author(s) submit this essay instead to another journal."

Response 1: In response to the reader’s comment that our article “does not…contribute substantially to the special issue’s thematic focus on care and the environment,” and their further suggestion that we “submit this essay instead to another journal,” we cannot point to specific revisions, as this is a global critique about fit between the article and the special issue. However, we do want to record two responses. First, we ourselves, in crafting this interdisciplinary essay, wondered whether our article on domestic workers and their caring for INDOOR environments would be a mismatch with the Humanities CPF on care and environment; hence our query to the special issue editors before submitting the piece. Second, given the two other reports which stress the importance of publishing the article, one specifically praising our emphasis on “the community, care dimension of activism,” we hope that there is room in the special issue to expand thinking about care of the environment to include caring about the way that more-than-human actants—i.e., chemicals in cleaners and a discourse of privacy protections (as cover for profiting from real estate renovation/investment)—continue to disable and attenuate care for domestic workers.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Excellent writing. The deep and meaningful engagement with scholarship and with women’s lived experiences (including their organized resistance) offers a vivid, urgent, compelling balance.

Some issues with punctuation.

the article is valuable to me as a multiculturalist literature-focused scholar because it offers an in-depth exploration of a focus I personally have not encountered in lit, the harms experienced by cleaners, harms that, as the authors astutely argue, are an ongoing, systemic result of capitalist colonial settler maintenance. The exploitive and polluting reality of cleaners’ work lives is glossed over in film and lit, either objectifying or romanticizing these women (and men). I appreciate the raw interview evidence interwoven in this article, which offers moving anecdotal insights that augment the authors’ scholarly argument. The article uses adequate sources (I am not, however, an environmental scientist) and is extremely well written and clean except for some issues with punctuation, as I note in my critique. It does not need revision, which is highly unusual for newly submitted research. In 35 years of reviewing articles for a number of journals, I have encountered only one piece completely ready for publication. This article is ready besides the punctuation issues that appear here and there throughout the document.

Author Response

Comments:

Comments 2: “Excellent writing. The deep and meaningful engagement with scholarship and with women’s lived experiences (including their organized resistance) offers a vivid, urgent, compelling balance.

Some issues with punctuation.

Response: Thank you for this generous review. We agree with it, and we have double-checked punctuation and revised accordingly (see track-changes).

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This article presents an important and compelling analysis of domestic workers' health narratives in the context of chemical toxicity, labour activism, and the intersections between race, class, and migratory status in California (and the USA more broadly). The sections on settler maintenance and the article's conclusion are particularly strong in situating these questions in conversation with one another, and with emphasising the community, care dimension of activism. This is important work that deserves to be published.

At present, however, some elements could be improved especially in terms of structure and cohesion of the argument itself:

- in the first sections, the testimonies from the domestic workers are mostly analysed through close reading that mostly repeats and rehashes the content of the testimonies themselves. If these testimonies are interpreted as narratives (ie as literary sources), the authors may consider emphasising the implicit dimensions of settler maintenance that the women touch upon more organically, including through unpacking more in detail and in depth the theoretical underpinnings of the article.

- p. 5 mentions the Climate Gothic in the section title, an element that suggests an emphasis on the literary element. No reference, however, is made to the Gothic genre and its subversive potentialities (its tackling capitalism, masculinity and Empire, for instance, at least since Frankenstein onwards). The Mexican Gothic, of course, is an newer genre that has established itself by now. Do the authors see these canons as in conversation with the narratives they analyse? If so, references to the eco-Gothic and the petro-Gothic may be useful and should be made more explicit throughout the article, eg with reference to the empty properties and speculation.

- p. 9: the relationship between land exploitation, pollution and undervalued/underpaid domestic work has been examined, among others, by Haraway in the Cyborg Manifesto, and Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures. Earlier engagement with such eco-feminist writings would improve the structure and cohesion of the argument.

- consider shortening footnotes: by way of example, on p. 11, reference to queer temporalities (which you correctly question), and p. 15, the historical contextualisation of the lack of value placed on domestic workers qua employees should be integrated in the main body. For the second point, you do this already on pages 17-18, so consider omitting the footnote completely.

- p. 13: consider adding Kylie Crane's Concrete and Plastic (Bloomsbury 2023) to your integration of Liboiron in relation to plastic's ubiquity.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor spelling/editing required, eg 'commoditization' needs to be edited into 'commodification' on p. 24.

Author Response

Comments: "This article presents an important and compelling analysis of domestic workers' health narratives in the context of chemical toxicity, labour activism, and the intersections between race, class, and migratory status in California (and the USA more broadly). The sections on settler maintenance and the article's conclusion are particularly strong in situating these questions in conversation with one another, and with emphasising the community, care dimension of activism. This is important work that deserves to be published.

At present, however, some elements could be improved especially in terms of structure and cohesion of the argument itself:

p. 13: consider adding Kylie Crane's Concrete and Plastic (Bloomsbury 2023) to your integration of Liboiron in relation to plastic's ubiquity."

Response: Thank you for this thoughtful review which we found the most helpful and detailed among the three. We have carefully dwelled upon each of the suggestions and respond below.

Comment 1: Regarding "the testimonies from the domestic workers are mostly analysed through close reading that mostly repeats and rehashes the content of the testimonies themselves. If these testimonies are interpreted as narratives (ie as literary sources), the authors may consider emphasising the implicit dimensions of settler maintenance that the women touch upon more organically, including through unpacking more in detail and in depth the theoretical underpinnings of the article..."

Response 1: We have been approaching the illness narratives not as literary texts to which we apply close reading, but as rhetorical texts. Moreover, by quoting these women at length, we aimed to show that they are rhetoricians (Alcala’s “Y no hay necesidad de usar líquidos fuertes [no strong liquids are necessary])” and theoreticians (e.g. Montiel on chemicals as part of modernization/progress narratives).

Comment 2: Re the question "Do the authors see these canons [of the Gothic] as in conversation with the narratives they analyse? If so, references to the eco-Gothic and the petro-Gothic may be useful and should be made more explicit throughout the article, eg with reference to the empty properties and speculation."

Reponse 2: footnote 3 (p. 2) cites Buell, noting that “lurid, gothic exposé” is one of four formal/thematic strategies in toxic discourse. We have added a footnote to p. 5 both referring back to footnote 3 and also elaborating briefly on eco-Gothic. However, we are not making a claim that the domestic workers are in active conversation with the literary Gothic.

Comment 3: Regarding the recommendation to cite Alaimo and Haraway earlier in the essay to lend our essay more cohesion,

Response 3: we appreciate the suggestion. While Haraway is an influence, as in the mention of companion species (p. 13), Cyborg Manifesto centers nimble-fingered Asian women as the cyborg and does not engage land in a way that, in our opinion, would have the effect of giving our argument more cohesion.

As our citation of Alaimo in footnote 42, pg. 17, indicates, we are also indebted to her scholarship and have been influenced by her ecofeminist emphasis on the agency of matter as well as the sociopolitical character of matter/materials (e.g. in our case, cleaning chemicals). Indeed, our interviewees named as peculiar to U.S. society the (over)reliance on strong chemical cleaners, so much so that the astringent smells of materials such as Clorox and Windex become synonymous with cleanliness. While (eco)feminism is an influence in our approach, it is also the case that our lens of settler-maintenance doesn’t stress all women’s frictionless alignment with each other through their shared attunement and situatedness in indoor environments. That is, some women (e.g., real estate lady employers) benefit from ignoring or not knowing the health damage cleaning chemicals pose to other women (the Latina domestic workers). Through the evidence of Latina care workers’ illness narratives, our article’s emphasis on care-as-practiced-through-settler-maintenance probes what is overlooked when cleaning chemicals expeditiously sanitize indoor environments: namely, the long term damage to the bodies directly giving care, as they repetitively apply these chemicals and are exposed to other workplace hazards.

As to the suggestion that referring to Bodily Natures earlier would lend more coherence to our article, we respectfully disagree. Bodily Natures emphasizes the requirement of those with environmental illnesses to become conversant in scientific knowledge, which is not our emphasis. Body Natures also focuses more on the continuity of bodies and places (transcorporeality) and less about how a fourfold lens on types of care (via Tronto) -- coupled with a focus on the rhetorical arguments of Latina domestic workers—provides a bottom-up view of 1) the ‘private’ household as a continuing site of colonial/imperial interactions and 2) how a labor-related injustice—namely, the endemic health harm to underpaid care-workers— continues to occur in furtherance of real estate business interests. In essence, our article demonstrates how a focus on care, via the testimony of a particularly vulnerable set of care-givers (Latina domestic workers), allows for multifaceted interventions.

One intervention may be that nonhuman matter (chemical toxicants) comprise these women’s bodily natures (as in Alaimo); however, we feel that our more original intervention comes about through our lens of settler-maintenance—that which names differently, and more attuned to hierarchies of power, the distinct investments and effects proceeding from two positions within Tronto’s fourfold care modalities.[2] Settler-maintenance treats the material bodies of s/he who “takes care of” the housework by hiring a domestic worker quite differently from the way it acutely intoxicates the bodyminds of she who directly “caregives”—handles these chemicals. Thus, while Tronto’s (fourfold) array of care provides a kind of template to understand varieties of care, settler-maintenance thickens the scene of care so that we can see direct caregiving as, in this case, made more chemically exposed, more risky than “caring about” or “taking care of”. Settler maintenance can be conceived as a material-discursive hybrid, i.e., the matter of chemicals, which substitute for adequate durations for scrubbing + social histories of racialized labor exploitation and the attenuation of indigenous sovereignty through cleaning jobs in white settler households. Indeed, the latter enables the exercise of the former. Latina domestic workers, as they become inserted into this material-discursive hybrid of settler-maintenance make it perceptible to themselves and others by way of their labor activism. To strengthen the link to Alaimo, we have placed the foregoing red type into the body of the paper (pg. 20).

[2] To quote ourselves, settler maintenance, at its most basic, bespeaks “a culturally specific mode of cleaning invested in branded formulas and astringent, volatilizing liquids, sometimes infused with ‘delicious’ masking scents that endemically maim those who handle them.^”

^{Comment 4: Regarding the recommendation to shorten footnotes, and omitting one entirely,}

Response 4: we’ve shortened the footnote on queer temporalities (p. 11, ft nt 23) as well as eliminated the historical contextualization on the racialized devaluing of labor typically performed by black and native populations (p. 14, ft nt 32). We’ve also shortened ft nt 35 (p. 15).

Comment 5: Regarding the recommendation to add Kylie Crane's Concrete and Plastic (Bloomsbury 2023) to your integration of Liboiron in relation to plastic's ubiquity.”

Response 5: Thanks for pointing us to this resource which we anticipate being influential in forthcoming work.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

See original comments.