168 Between Private and Public
liberal elites of all nationalities, with some UAE intellectuals involved in
writing editorials.
Domestic workers also have a presence in the entertainment media.
In Turkey, contemporary television serials and films use particular “types”
of domestic workers to mark the families employing them.^48 If domestics
wear uniforms, we are dealing with an elite family; the presence of older
black women symbolizes the well-to-do past of the family and adds to
the positive qualities of family life such as loyalty, love and respect for
the elderly; if governesses are employed the message is that we are deal-
ing with a family aspiring to Westernization; and when unpaid peasant
children are present, the cruelty of the family is underlined. In other
cases domestic workers are the main protagonists. Jureidini focuses on
how Egyptian melodramas hone in on the circumstances that have forced
women into this type of work and the ways in which they succeed in mov-
ing out of this field of employment, often through marriage with their
employer or his son.^49 In some cases this is presented as an evil plot by
the domestic (whose sexuality is seen as a threat); at other times it is the
romantic happy ending of a life of hardship (with the domestic worker
represented as the upwardly mobile victim). In such fictional accounts,
local rather than migrant domestic workers are the central characters.
While this may be due to the fact that in Egypt a considerable number of
local women are employed as domestics, migrant domestic workers may
also be seen as “too different” for the audience to become emotionally
involved. Yet, presenting domestics as the central characters has not gone
uncontested in productions for an international public. The producers of
the upscale docudrama, Marriage Egyptian Style, were sharply criticized
for selecting a cleaning lady as its main protagonist rather than a well edu-
cated, modern and civilized middle-class woman. Because they chose a
person deemed unsuitable “to represent the nation,” the producers (espe-
cially the Egyptian researcher) were accused of having severely damaged
Egypt’s reputation abroad.^50
lthough these are only a few examples of the presence of (migrant) A
domestic workers in the media, it is evident that different media focus on
different categories of domestic workers and different issues. The publi-
cations of international NGOs deal with the abuse of migrant domestic
workers, while the local press highlights the dangers of migrant domestic