“But on Sunday, They Are Free”: Tomboy Domesticity and Home Time in Sunday Beauty Queen

This article examines the site of the home in Baby Ruth Villarama's 2016 documentary Sunday Beauty Queen to better understand how tomboy migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong mess up and queer domesticity. By focusing on the appearances in the film of the home of Leo Selomenio, a tomboy Filipino migrant domestic helper and organizer of Sunday beauty pageants, the author explores alternative modes of care performed by tomboys that refuse respectability politics as they operate within transnational migrant labor structures. Despite the regulatory and confining modes of racialized and gendered care that structure global care work, Selomenio reconfigures and reshapes his home to operate as a site of refuge, an archive, a gathering space, and a site of resistance. Engaging in what the author terms “tomboy domesticity,” Selomenio utilizes his control over home space and time as a result of his exemption from the live-in requirement of his work to ensure collective survival in the face of labor precarity. Selomenio's performance of care ethics that refuse the state's neglect of domestic helpers articulates tomboy and diasporic Filipino life as valuable outside of its capacity to labor.