Page - 54 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

54 | Stefanie Knauss www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 45–66 expanded to include women, the caregiver role has not come to include men. In general, women who engage in paid work in addition work a “second shift” at home. For women, relationships of care – according to complementary gender theories the form of relationship they are naturally most suited for21 – thus be- come a liability which might limit their educational or job opportunities, pushing them into low-income unqualified jobs.22 Rosetta is one of these women: she works at a minimum wage in precarious jobs that do not even afford unemploy- ment benefits because she is fired when her probation period comes up, and yet she cannot not accept these jobs, because she needs her wages to care for her mother, whose alcoholism puts not just economic, but also emotional stress on the young woman. Rosetta is caught in the vicious circle of needing work so badly that she cannot afford to be choosy, but ends up with jobs that do not of- fer her the stability she needs to make a significant change in her mother’s and her own life, thus contributing to the perpetuation of the system.23 While in the film, the world of work is critically shown as marked by the ex- ploitative mechanisms of capitalism, of which women in particular are the victim because of their twofold obligations to their paid work outside the home and unpaid family work at home, it also emphasizes the positive aspects of work, paralleling thus the view of work in Christian social ethics. Rosetta wants a job not only because of the wage it pays, but also because of the social recognition it affords her. Her insistence on paid labor as a sign of normalcy might be seen as consequence of precisely those mechanisms that create her vulnerability – the ideal worker role and its complementary devaluation of relationships and family work – yet it also underlines the value of work as more than a means to make a living. When Rosetta is shown mixing the batter in the waffle factory, selling waffles in the stand or washing her apron, the badge of her status as a regular worker, with the camera focusing closely on her competent, economic gestures, it becomes clear that work is for her an existential human need and the expression of her individual capacity, and thus fundamental to her human dignity (fig. 4). While the film criticizes the exploitative capitalist labor system and the way it disadvantages women such as Rosetta, who have dependents for whom they care, it never suggests that care work is the kind of work that more fully corresponds to Rosetta’s feminine genius than wage work, as secular and religious complementary theories of gender would propose.24 In tracing the complexities of Rosetta’s attempts to negotiate wage and care work, and her place within these worlds, the film notes the ambivalent value of relationships for Rosetta. Relationships are for her both a sign and a cause of 21 Cf. Hinze 2009, 75. 22 Cf. Clark 2010 for a discussion of the gender aspects of care work. 23 Cf. Albrecht 2002, 143. 24 Cf. Hinze 2009; Cahill 2014, 31.