Issue

Vol. 5 No. 2 (2016)

Houseboying: Negotiating the Intersectionality of Race, Gender, Class and Age in Selected Fiction

https://doi.org/10.56279/jhss.v5i2.143
John Wakota

Corresponding Author(s) : John Wakota

john.wakota@udsm.ac.tz

Journal of Humanities & Social Science (JHSS), Vol. 5 No. 2 (2016)

Abstract

Tracing a thread from the fictionalized pre-colonial to the post-independence period,
this paper analyzes the representation of houseboying by locating it at the
intersection of gender, race and class. Reading the representation of domestic service
against a backcloth of a discourse that constructs the houseboy as a primitive being,
the paper analyzes houseboying as a process of civilization, a form of power relations;
and a site where social inequalities and social differences are produced; contested,
negotiated and renegotiated. Since houseboying requires servile postures and is
stereotypically based on reversal of gender roles, the question this paper asks is: How
does the houseboy acquire them given that his background is portrayed to be
patriarchal per se where even boys are groomed to be prospective paterfamilias? In
analyzing the portrayal of how the houseboy‘s masculinity is compromised and how
he deals with the resultant societal stigma associated with his work, the paper also
examines how, ironically, houseboys are portrayed to be complacent in sustaining and
occasionally enforcing the asymmetrical master-servant relationship. It argues that the
houseboy‘s ?slavish‘ posture is only situational—a performance and a strategic
adaptation to the demands of domestic service.

Keywords

houseboying, fiction, race, gender, class, age
Houseboying: Negotiating the Intersectionality of Race, Gender, Class and Age in Selected Fiction. (2022). Journal of Humanities & Social Science (JHSS), 5(2). https://doi.org/10.56279/jhss.v5i2.143
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Houseboying: Negotiating the Intersectionality of Race, Gender, Class and Age in Selected Fiction. (2022). Journal of Humanities & Social Science (JHSS), 5(2). https://doi.org/10.56279/jhss.v5i2.143
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