Based on anthropological fieldwork in Yemen, this article examines the relationship between gender, mobility, and il/legality in the lives of Ethiopian domestic workers. Studies about migrant domestic workers in the Middle East often focus on abuse and exploitation, making a plea for the regulation of women’s legal status. Yet legal migration does not automatically mean that women gain more rights and become more mobile; regulation may also entail more control. The relationship between method of entry and legal status is not (...) fixed, and the boundaries between legality and illegality are often blurred, with women moving in and out of il/legality and legal organizations following illegal practices, and vice versa. Gendered state policies and practices also affect women’s space for maneuvering, and attempts at regulation may further restrict rather than increase their mobility. (shrink)

In recent years a number of important studies have explored the new international division of reproductive labor, but those works have concentrated, for the most part, on one end of the life cycle: nannies and childcare. This article focuses on the other end of it, home eldercare work. Jobs falling under this label encompass a variety of work situations but the title suggests a job that is more homogeneous than the occupation actually is. This article explores, through the narratives of (...) the workers and the exploration of this 24-hour job, what it means to work as a home eldercare assistant. (shrink)

This paper critically explores the way in which ‘trafficking’ has been framed as a problem involving organized criminals and ‘sex slaves’, noting that this approach obscures both the relationship between migration policy and ‘trafficking’, and that between prostitution policy and forced labour in the sex sector. Focusing on the UK, it argues that far from representing a step forward in terms of securing rights and protections for those who are subject to exploitative employment relations and poor working conditions in the (...) sex trade, the current policy emphasis on sex slaves and ‘victims of trafficking’ limits the state's obligations towards them. (shrink)

. Some problems and possibilities of caring. Ethics, Place & Environment: Vol. 13, The Ethics of Care, pp. 113-130. doi: 10.1080/13668791003778800.

Writing on care highlights that caring is full of both problems and possibilities. Caring for others can be a source of pleasure and fulfillment, but it can also be undervalued and denied, a source...

What makes a multimillion-dollar, transnational intimate industry possible when most people see it as exploitative? Using the newly emergent case of commercial surrogacy in India, this article extends the literature on stratified reproduction and intimate industries by examining how surrogacy persists and thrives despite its common portrayal as the “rent-a-womb industry” and “baby factory.” Using interview data with eight infertility specialists, 20 intended parents, and 70 Indian surrogate mothers, as well as blogs and media stories, we demonstrate how market actors (...) justify their pursuits through narrating moral frames of compassion and altruism that are not incidental but systematic to and constitutive of transnational surrogacy. We observed two predominant moral frames: surrogacy liberates and empowers Indian women from patriarchal control; and surrogacy furthers reproductive rights. Within these frames, the market exchange of money for babies is cast as compassion, which allows commissioning clients to sidestep accusations of racism, classism, and sexism. Yet, we reveal that the ability to navigate around these threats relies on racist, classist, and sexist tropes about Third World working-class women. Further, we find that surrogate mothers did not experience significant changes in economic status after surrogacy. (shrink)

This article explores the gendered construction of South Korean citizenship through the lens of North Korean settlers' experiences in South Korea. Drawing on ethnographic research, the author delves into the citizen-making process, critically examining the impact of gendered modernizing projects on North Korean settlers' daily lives. North Korean settlers are expected to get rid of their ethnic markers and transform themselves into modern citizen-subjects of South Korea. The author demonstrates that the overall frame of perception of North Korean settlers is (...) deeply gendered, with modernity as a powerful ethnic marker. The notion of ethnicized citizenship in the context of two Koreas offers a concrete account of how ethnicities are created and employed in stratified structure of citizenship. (shrink)

This article examines the configuration of domestic service within local milieus under globalization. Using Taiwan as a case study, the author argues that the state continues to have an impact even in this age of global interdependence. The management of foreign domestics within employers’ households is not only important for labor control but also central to the state’s administration over alien subjects. The case of Taiwan calls attention to the necessity of bringing the state back into the analysis of gender (...) and carework. (shrink)

Home-based service jobs have developed considerably across Western societies. In fact, chances are high that a working-class woman in France today will, at some point in her life, be a house cleaner, home-based child care provider, or home aide for the elderly. Going against political, scholarly, and everyday discourses that, saturated with the double prejudices of gender and class, treat all these home service occupations, which require little prior training, the same, this article illuminates the variability of the forms of (...) subordination experienced by women practicing these occupations in France. Comparing these jobs with the ensemble of low-skill jobs and with each other exposes what is specific to the particular form of subordination each job type entails, in terms of the extent of job supervision and the nature of the home where it is practiced, the presence or absence of relations with coworkers and/or a “public,” and the nature of this “public.” It mobilizes nationwide statistical data in a new way to shift attention to these numerous ordinary work situations, which are much less studied than those of the domestic workers of the wealthiest cities of the Western world. (shrink)

The nurturing that produces love, care, and solidarity constitutes a discrete social system of affective relations. Affective relations are not social derivatives, subordinate to economic, political, or cultural relations in matters of social justice. Rather, they are productive, materialist human relations that constitute people mentally, emotionally, physically, and socially. As love laboring is highly gendered, and is a form of work that is both inalienable and noncommodifiable, affective relations are therefore sites of political import for social justice. We argue that (...) it is impossible to have gender justice without relational justice in loving and caring. Moreover, if love is to thrive as a valued social practice, public policies need to be directed by norms of love, care, and solidarity rather than norms of capital accumulation. To promote equality in the affective domains of loving and caring, we argue for a four-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional model of social justice as proposed by Nancy Fraser. Such a model would align relational justice, especially in love laboring, with the equalization of resources, respect, and representation. (shrink)

This paper examines nurses’ international migration within the broader context of female migration, particularly against more studied groups of women who have migrated for employment in care‐giving roles. We analyze the similarities and differences between skilled professional female migrants (nurses) and domestic workers (nannies and in‐home caretakers) and how societal expectations, meanings, and values of care and ‘women's work’, together with myriad social, cultural, economic and political processes, construct the female migrant care‐giver experience. We argue that, as the recruitment of (...) foreign workers gains visibility, strategies are introduced to better prepare female migrant care‐givers for the marketplace. Language, specifically command of English and accent modification, is highlighted as one means to assimilate migrant care‐givers to host communities. (shrink)

This article probes the politics of the migrant caregiver/citizen-employer relationship in Palestine/israel as it unfolds within the Jewish-Israeli home. Based on interviews with migrants from the Philippines, Nepal, India and Sri Lanka and their Jewish-Israeli employers, I examine how Israel’s ethno-racially hierarchical citizenship regime and the transnational gendering and racialisation of carework manifest in this relationship. I begin by situating migrant women working as caregivers within the legal and political context of Palestine/israel, delineating how gendered constructions of the Jewish-Israeli woman (...) uphold the borders of the nation and paint non-Jewish migrant women as reproductively threatening. I then analyse two common tropes among citizen-employers in describing migrant caregivers. The first, what I term the ‘kinship trope’, characterizes them as ‘one of the family’, obscuring the ethno-racial basis of the state. I show how this trope contrasts sharply with Zionist settler colonial rhetoric portraying Jewish-Israelis as ‘one big family’. The second trope represents migrant women as individual agents of economic development and Israel as a market-driven, neoliberal society that is equally a state for all its citizens. By depicting Israel as a ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ state that is an exemplar of gender equality, this trope again masks the ethno-racial basis of citizenship, as well as gender disparities. Finally, I argue for a feminist approach to migrant carework that accounts for the ways neoliberal labour formations are mediated by gendered racisms specific to a particular state’s racial nation-building project. (shrink)

Drawing from ethnographic research in the Research Triangle of North Carolina and Williamsburg, Virginia, the authors build on Anzaldúa's conceptualization of “borderlands” to analyze how borders of social membership are constructed and enforced in “el Nuevo South.” Our gender analysis reveals that intersecting structural conditions—the labor market, the organization of public space, and the institutional organization of health care and other public services—combine with gendered processes in the home and family to regulate women's participation in community life. Enforcers of borders (...) include institutional actors, mostly women, in social services and clinics who occupy institutional locations that enable them to define who is entitled to public goods and to categorize migrants as undeserving “others.” We reveal how a particularly configured matrix of domination transcends the spheres of home, work, and community to constrain women migrants' physical and economic mobility and personal autonomy and to inhibit their participation in their societies of reception. (shrink)

Through in-depth interviews with 41 middle-class Puerto Rican transmigrants, this research examines how gender constrains global care work. Migration compromises embeddedness in care networks, concurrently heightening its meaning. Women felt these effects more acutely than men given their primary responsibility for reproductive work. Migrants engaged in emotion work to cope with constraints, strategically rearticulating care work; yet unsuccessful strategies resulted in further emotional dislocation, particularly for women. Migration led to a dichotomy in which professional success was pitted against emotional fulfillment (...) through care work. Gender, cultural, and geopolitical factors mediated this split, contributing to a permanently unsettled flow of migrants. (shrink)

This article considers whether there is a specific demand for migrant domestic workers in the UK, or for workers with particular characteristics that in theory could be met by citizens. It discusses how immigration status can make it easier not only to recruit domestic workers, but also to retain them. `Foreignness' may also make the management of the employment relation easier with employers anxious to discover a coincidence of interest with the worker. Employers are not only looking for generic `foreignness' (...) however, but typically also seek particular nationalities or ethnicities of worker, which can raise difficulties for agencies who are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of `race'. (shrink)

Feminist literature on care has extensively addressed inequalities that cut across the social categories of gender, class and ethnicity in relation to care work. One category that has received less attention in theories of caregiving so far is age. Built on the feminist literature of care and taking young (female) carers as its subject matter, this article tackles age as a third social category of intersectional inequalities along with class and gender. Firstly, through dealing with Nancy Fraser’s justice framework of (...) participatory parity, it is argued that addressing the intersectional inequalities that young (female) carers face necessitates a justice framework that contemplates both the distributional and recognitional aspects of care. In this respect a dual conceptualisation of care is presented – both as a social good and a social process. Secondly, a critical analysis will be presented of the elements of the justice framework of Fraser, where the notion of subordinated status will be related to the identities of young carers. Lastly, the normative framework participatory parity will be discussed in relation to the politics of need, as care practices define the needs of young carers that are contextualised in the care processes, but also in a childhood space. (shrink)

Putting migrant remittances into house construction and rebuilding is generally seen as either conspicuous consumption or productive investment, but in both cases the perspective is economistic. This article argues that only when the cultural dimension of economic action is understood will it be possible to comprehend migrant spending on houses. Specifically, this article seeks to understand why, in the case of the rural Tagalog village in this study, located in upland Batangas Province in the Philippines, overseas labour migrants build houses (...) that they do not even live in, but are given to parents or simply left unoccupied. The explanation is framed in relation to the meanings of houses in a culture of bilateral kinship, which the Philippines shares with most parts of Southeast Asia, but inflected by distinct colonial influences. The article demonstrates the ways in which houses as memorials serve as idioms of ties of relatedness within kin groups and the broader community, ties that are being transformed by global migration and experienced differently yet maintained, renegotiated yet sustained transnationally. (shrink)

Care drain brings the traditional problem of carers' choice between paid work and family at a new level. Taking care drain from Romania as a case study, I analyse the consequences of parents' migration within a normative framework committed to meeting the needs of vulnerable individuals. The temporary migration of parents who cannot take their children with them involves moral harm, particularly the frustration of children's developmental and emotional needs. I use recent feminist work on justice and care in the (...) economy to address the question whose responsibility it is to fill the void of care created by temporary migration. I argue that the moral issues raised by care drain are also issues of social justice and therefore call for rectification by the states involved. (shrink)

Unquestionably, the zeitgeist of Web 2.0 is symbolized by the dominance of social networking sites (SNS) and user-created content (UCC). MySpace, Facebook, and Cyworld mini-hompy are but a few examples of SNS that are becoming increasingly part of urban everyday life and interwoven into the historicity of the Internet. Web 2.0 has promised much about new forms of participation, creation, collaboration, and authorship, and yet within each location, we can find examples of both empowerment and exploitation. This is particularly the (...) case in the divergent region of the Asia-Pacific. Rather than the region being a sum of “imagined communities” (Anderson 1983), this paper argues that the distributed social networks of Web 2.0 UCC is formed, informed, and maintained through the perpetual process of “imaging communities.” These imaging communities can be seen in the visual, textual, and aural modes of UCC and can be seen to reflect the region’s new technocultural cartographies. (shrink)

A growing body of scholarship has documented the experiences of different groups of migrants involved in the maintenance and development of transnational families worldwide showing that proximity is not a prerequisite of family life and that families can successfully be done from a distance. While most work deals with the experiences of labour migrants less attention has been paid to forced migrants. Still little is known about families that fail to operate transnationally and are broken by the migration experience. For (...) instance, when can we say that this type of family cannot be sustained? This article, drawing on the transnational motherhood literature and on Zontini previous study on Filipino labour migrants in Southern Europe, highlights the factors that shape transnational parenting. The authors then use this framework to explore the experiences of a group of Zimbabwean asylum seeking mothers in the UK. In doing so, the authors point out some of the specificities of this particular group; highlighting the differentiated impact of transnationalism and contributing to refining the literature on transnational parenthood. (shrink)

A care deficit is clearly evident in global cities such as London and is attributable to an ageing population, the increased employment of native-born women, prevalent gender ideologies that continue to exempt men from much reproductive work, as well as the failure of the state to provide viable alternatives. However, while it is now acknowledged that migrant women, and to a lesser extent, migrant men, step in to provide care in cities such as London, there is less research on how (...) this shapes the nature, politics and ethics of care. Drawing upon empirical research with low-paid migrant workers employed as domiciliary care providers in London, this paper explores the emergence of a distinct migrant ethic of care that is critically shaped by the caring work that migrant women and men perform. (shrink)

The author argues for passing on a particular brand of feminism to next generations. The cultural archive to be passed on should be transnational, intersectional, interdisciplinary, relational and reflexive. In particular, the author focuses on processes and practices of racialization as they impact on and are practised within the discipline. In the current backlash against feminism and women’s studies in different parts of Europe, frequently divisionary tactics are deployed, by which women are pitted against each other, based on assumed immutable (...) differences which are conceived of as either ‘raciological’, ethnicized or as cultural, in such a way that ‘race’ enters again through the back door. The author argues that we need a European brand of feminism that is not complicit with the legacies of modernity, which continue to construct ‘race’. That is, we should be deeply concerned with thinking through the parameters of a viable anti-racist European women’s studies. By analysing various case studies, taken from the everyday Dutch reality at the beginning of this new millennium, the author shows the necessity and inescapability of the feminism she advocates. (shrink)

Previous research has examined growing globalized divisions in domestic labor through the perspective of poor migrant women who perform care work in advanced industrialized societies. This article explores this global trend in reverse, focusing on first-world women who migrate into developing countries and engage with local dynamics of care through volunteer work. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Helping Hands, an organization of expatriate wives that assisted a local state-run orphanage in Beijing, China, I argue that gendered processes (...) of privileged migration caused women to develop a “logic of care” that equated good care solely with maternal nurturance and emotional connection. This logic permeated their volunteer efforts, causing conflicts with Chinese state caregivers who prioritized the performance of reproductive tasks. This case demonstrates the socially constructed nature of logics that underlie care practices and their relationship to increasingly transnational configurations of privilege and inequality. When applied to first-world women’s charitable activities in developing countries, unquestioned gendered logics can reinforce larger global disparities of power through the stratified provision of care. (shrink)

‘Service’, particularly ‘domestic service’, operates as a specific articulation or intersection of processes of race, class, gender and age that reiterates images of the sexual desirability of some women racially marked by blackness or indigeneity in Latin America. The sexualisation of racially subordinated people has been linked to the exercise of power. This article focuses on an aspect of subordination related to the condition of being a servant, and the ‘domestication’ and ‘acculturation’ that domestic service implies in societies where black (...) and indigenous people are often linked to ‘backwardness’. Perceived racial otherness, class subordination, gender, age and domesticated servitude together reinforce an erotic image of sexual availability, particularly in younger women. (shrink)

This article examines Swedish migrant women to the United States. It asks how racially privileged European migrants adapt to US racial and gender hierarchies that require them to relinquish their economic security and gender autonomy in a neoliberal state? Drawing upon interviews and focus group discussions with 33 Swedish women and three of their spouses, and participant observation between 2006 and 2008 in a network for Swedish speaking women living in the US, the article discusses how a group of ‘white’ (...) migrant women who arrive in the US with an ideology of gender egalitarianism negotiate a more socially conservative and economically vulnerable lifestyle, as the wives of upper-middle-class men. The article argues that while Swedish women benefit from their racial and social privileges in the US they lose their sense of economic security, acquiring new anxieties that make them reluctant to renounce their Swedish citizenship which they conceive of as a ‘flexible’ resource. (shrink)

Growing social inequalities represent a major concern associated with the Digital Revolution. The article tackles this issue by exploring how welfare regulations and redistribution policies can be rethought in the age of digital capitalism. It focuses on the history and enduring crisis of social citizenship rights in their connection with technological changes, in order to draw a comparison between the industrial and the digital scenario. The first section addresses the link between the Industrial Revolution and the genesis of social rights. (...) It describes the latter as a legal ‘machine’ designed to offset the imbalances produced by the technological movement of industrialization. The second and third sections introduce the notion of ‘industrial citizenship’ to describe the architecture of social rights in mature industrial societies and to contend that European systems of welfare are still largely modeled on an industrial standard. The fourth part investigates the impact of the Digital Revolution on this model of social citizenship. It identifies debates on basic income as a major trajectory for redesigning welfare regulations in a post-industrial era, and the digital user as a crucial emerging subject of rights. The final part explores how digital users could be entitled to social rights as data suppliers. To this end, it introduces the idea of ‘digital-social rights’ resulting from the incorporation of welfare and redistribution principles into emerging digital rights. Hence, it proposes a legal-political framework for the redistribution of the revenues generated by data in the form of a ‘digital basic income’ for citizens of cyberspace. (shrink)

This essay explores the relationships between labour and community formation in order to think through how, where, and when diasporic solidarities are imagined or refused. I draw on ethnographic research among Jamaican women contracted for seasonal work in US hotels to situate diasporic calls and responses in relation to specific contexts and a changing global political economy. I show how global geopolitical shifts not only shape the processes of identity formation and social reproduction, but also condition the perpetuation of notions (...) of nationalized racial hierarchies and ideologies of progress. I also show that hotel workers’ notions of ‘America’ and their commitment to the ‘American Dream’ shapes their subjectivities as migrant workers/consumers and, in their assessment, differentiates them from African-Americans, particularly those most immediately affected by Hurricane Katrina. In doing so, I demonstrate that one of the ideological hegemonies of diaspora is the idea that an individual's capacity to affect their own social mobility and that of their social network always outstrips the ‘locals’ in diasporic elsewheres. (shrink)

A longitudinal perspective on motherhood that spans the experience of gestation, birthing, the care of young children, and the mother’s relation to her grown children makes way for a conception of the mother as essentially plural. It shall be argued in this paper that maternity is necessarily tied to surrogacy, that it is divided into a multiplicity of tasks inevitably parceled out to multiple agents. In this essay, the analysis of maternal surrogacy is focused on the phenomenon of mothering from (...) a distance, a maternal practice engendered by the feminization and globalization of labor markets. By both affirming the value of maternal surrogates and questioning the limits of surrogacy, this analysis of motherhood challenges both the economic exploitation that engenders and sustains distant mothering and the gendered division of care labor that supports the global economy of care. (shrink)

This article utilizes the lens of disposability to explore recent conditions of low-wage temporary migrant labour, whose numbers and economic sectors have expanded in the 21stcentury. A central argument is that disposability is a discursive and material relation of power that creates and reproduces invidious distinctions between the value of “legitimate” Canadian settler-citizens and the lack of worth of undesirable migrant populations working in Canada, often for protracted periods of time. The analytical lens of migrant disposability draws upon theorizing within (...) Marxian, critical modernity studies, and decolonizing settler colonial frameworks. This article explores the technologies of disposability that lay waste to low wage workers in sites such as immigration law and provincial/territorial employment legislation, the workplace, transport, living conditions, access to health care and the practice of medical repatriation of injured and ill migrant workers. The mounting evidence that disposability is immanent within low-wage migrant labour schemes in Canada has implications for migrant social justice. The failure to protect migrant workers from a vast array of harms reflects the historical foundations of Canada’s contemporary migrant worker schemes in an “inherited background field [of settler colonialism] within which market, racist, patriarchal and state relations converge”. Incremental liberal reform has made little headway insofar as the administration and in some cases reversal of more progressive reforms such as guaranteed pathways to citizenship prioritize employers’ labour interests and the lives and health of primarily white, middle class Canadian citizens at the expense of a shunned and racialized but growing population of migrants from the global South. Transformational change and social justice for migrant workers can only occur by reversing the disposability and hyper-commodification intrinsic to low-wage migrant programs and granting full permanent legal status to migrant workers. (shrink)

This article aims to contribute to current debates about international migration and the restructuring of the Welfare state in Europe, by highlighting the specificities of the French context. It draws on ethnographic research about the training of unemployed migrant women as domestic workers in Paris to address the ambiguities that underlie the enterprise of professionalizing domestic service. The qualitative data presented in the article show how essentialist ideologies operate within training practices of domestic workers. They reveal that the training practices (...) challenge the association of the job with domesticity, but fail to acknowledge the racist organization of domestic service. Hence, they endorse essentialist constructions of cultural difference. Training practices are also consistent with current neoliberal policies and discourses on unemployment and ‘employability’, as they are framed by the normative reference to an entrepreneurial model of society. Finally, the data suggest that migrant women's experience of domestic service as a prospective job and their scepticism about the enterprise of professionalizing radically differ from the instructors’ views. (shrink)

Despite the fact that there is unmet demand for nurses in health services around the world, some nurses migrate to destination countries to work as domestic workers. According to the literature, these nurses experience contradictions in class mobility and are at increased risk of exploitation and abuse. This article presents a critical discussion of the migration of nurses as domestic workers using the concept of ‘global care chain’. Although several scholars have used the concept of global care chains to illustrate (...) south to north migration of domestic workers and nurses, there is a paucity of literature on the migration of nurses to destination countries as domestic workers. The migration of nurses to destination countries as domestic workers involves the extraction of reproductive and skilled care labor without adequate compensatory mechanisms to such skilled nurses. Using the case of the Canadian Live‐in Caregiver Program, the study illustrates how the global movement of internationally educated nurses as migrant domestic workers reinforces inequities that are structured along the power gradient of gender, class, race, nationality, and ethnicity, especially within an era of global nursing shortage. (shrink)

This paper argues that human rights-based approaches to human security overlook the importance of caring values, relations of care, and care work in the achievement and long-term maintenance of human security. It outlines an alternative approach to the ethics of human security which combines a feminist ontological and normative position on the centrality of caring values and practices in sustaining life with a feminist account of the gendered political economy of contemporary globalisation. Moreover, it argues that a critical, feminist ethics (...) of care can provide a comprehensive ontological and normative framework for integrating economic exclusion with violence, and thus for understanding and conceptualising human security in a way that is sensitive to the role played by gender identities and other types of power relations. This, I argue, can be achieved through an interrogation of the relationship between neoliberal globalisation and hegemonic forms masculinity in the context of contemporary global governance. (shrink)

This article defends an ethics of care approach to global justice, which begins with an empirically informed account of injustices resulting from the workings and effects of contemporary neo-liberalism and hegemonic masculinities. Dominant distributive approaches to global justice see the unequal distribution of resources or ?primary goods? as the basic source of injustice. Crucially, however, most of these liberal theories do not challenge the basic structural and ideational ?frames? that govern the global political economy. Instead, they seek to ?correct? unjust (...) patterns of distribution according to an ideal theory. Subjects in these theories are generally understood as abstract, autonomous and impartial; this is in contrast to an ethics of care, which starts with an ontology of the subject as embodied, vulnerable and relational. The first part of this article explores the role and nature of theory in relation to the task of considering injustice on a global scale and offers a critique of the narrow focus in traditional theories of justice on the distribution of ?primary goods?. The second part considers the effects of neo-liberal globalization and hegemonic masculinities on global working families in order to illustrate the relationship between care and global justice. The final section sketches out a care-ethics approach to global injustice, focusing on three features: first, care as a relational approach; second, the focus in care ethics on intersecting structures of injustice; and third, care as a multi-scalar approach to global injustice. (shrink)

This paper explores the potential for an international political theory of care as an alternative to liberalism in the context of contemporary global politics. It argues that relationality and interdependence, and the responsibilities for and practices of care that arise therewith, are fundamental aspects of moral life and sites of political contestation that have been systematically denied and obfuscated under liberalism. A political theory of care brings into view the responsibilities and practices of care that sustain not just ‘bare life’ (...) but all social life, from nuclear and extended families to local, national and transnational communities. It disrupts and challenges the individualism of liberalism, and the associated valorization of ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘toleration’. Instead, it emphasizes an ontology of relationality and interdependence that accepts the existence of vulnerability without reifying particular individuals, groups or states as ‘victims’ or ‘guardians’. Furthermore, by demonstrating the gendered and raced nature of caring in the contemporary world—from the household to the transnational level—an international political theory of care challenges our received assumptions about ‘dependence’ in world politics, and opens up space to interrogate politically not only gender but race and other aspects of inequality in the global political economy. (shrink)

The au pair program in general is still known as a form of cultural exchange program and a good possibility for young women to spend a year abroad, although it has undergone great changes during the last 10 years. This article argues that due to different socio-economic and cultural processes in Western postindustrial societies as well as in the eastern and southern parts of the world the au pair program is becoming a form of domestic work with quite similar working (...) and living conditions to that of live-in migrant domestic workers. This article which is based on two empirical studies on the globalizing au pair business in Eastern and Western Europe as well in the United States looks into the motivations and expectations, the living conditions and interactions between the au pairs and the employer families and contrasts these findings with the discourse of the au pair agencies still advertising au pair as a form of cultural exchange. In doing so the paper can show that it is the still dominant image of au-pair as a cultural exchange program (disarticulating the work aspect) that leaves the young au pair women even more vulnerable to exploitation: ‘big sisters’ are the best domestic servants. This article draws attention to the racialized economization of the private sphere and care work, the inherent traps and exploitative features of this very specific work place. (shrink)

In this article, I propose to look at the organisation of reproductive labour in the ‘global North’ through a lens of epistemic ignorance. Focusing on the process of outsourcing, I argue that it creates forms of irresponsibility, and with it, epistemic ignorance. The devaluation of domestic work and the degradation of domestic workers is shaped by gendered and colonial ideologies, and Western epistemologies. These epistemologies underpin a strong subject/object split and buffer the denial of existing interdependencies. I problematise those epistemologies (...) by drawing on feminist care ethics, accounts of relational selves and relational responsibility, and alternative epistemologies. Grounding that discussion on vignettes from an in-depth study of heterosexual couples in Austrian households who outsource domestic work, I argue that the systematic failure to see what and who we are connected to in the domestic realm is shaped by gendered and racialised privilege, and driven by an epistemology of separation. My argument will unfold in two steps. First, I use the concept of the skin as an example of how the beliefs in an independent, autonomous self and a strong subject/object split disguise connectedness and relationality. This leads me to the second step, in which I explicate my notion of semipermeable membranes – a thinking together of ontological permeability and ethical responsiveness. I argue that active forms of ‘unknowing’ at work in ‘mundane,’ everyday, domestic performances have far-reaching consequences. (shrink)

This article explores how paid domestic work is framed in state policies and discourses, drawing upon theoretical discussions on gender, welfare and global care chains. Based on a case study of the political debate on the `reconciliation of personal, family and work life' in Spain, the author argues that dominant policy frames relate gender inequality to women's unpaid domestic work and care, while domestic workers are essentially the invisible `other'. Empowering and disempowering frames are discussed; domestic workers are mainly constructed (...) as a solution to the care problem and only marginally as subjects and rights-holders. The overall aim is to examine how public policies legitimize and produce social inequalities related to gender, class and nationality. (shrink)

Drawing on 68 interviews with South Korean students at elite U.S. colleges, this article examines the intersectional power of gender and class in elite transnational parenting—a family strategy for class reproduction. Well-educated, stay-at-home mothers intensively managed their children’s school activities, often relying on gender-segregated networks, mostly during early school years. By contrast, cosmopolitan professional fathers heavily engaged in guiding their children’s education abroad and career preparation in later years, using their class resources. In high-achieving children’s narratives, mothers’ lifelong care for (...) and management of their private life was undervalued and criticized, while fathers’ growing involvement in their higher education and career was highly valued and appreciated. The elite fathers’ occasional yet detailed involvement challenges the dichotomy that has long stereotyped Korean—or East Asian—mothers as overinvolved and fathers as distant in their children’s lives, especially with regard to education. Gender, through intensive parenting, reinforces and reproduces class disparity between elite couples and within their families. (shrink)

In this study I highlight the spatial exclusions that migrant domestic workers experience in Lebanon. I argue that migrant domestic workers constantly challenge such spatial exclusions by using the exact spaces that they are excluded from as the bases for a meso-level of resistances—strategic acts that cannot be classified as either private and individual or as organized collective action. I highlight three kinds of such resistive activities: the strategic dyads forged across balconies by the most restricted live-in workers, the small (...) collectives formed outside ethnic churches by other live-in workers, and much larger worker collectives in rental apartments occupied by illegal freelancers and runaways. By analyzing these spaces as strategic instances of workers’ collectives, I question the portrayal of MDWs in the Arab world as ultimate and defeated victims of abuse. But the continuum of resistive activities undertaken by MDWs in Lebanon also challenges the dichotomies often constructed between public and private forms of organization and resistances. This meso-level of resistance becomes particularly significant in a country like Lebanon, where MDWs are forbidden from forming or joining formal unions, and becomes critical for workers from many countries in Africa and South Asia who, unlike the larger Filipina community, have little access to formal support systems like consulates and embassies. (shrink)

This essay argues that Catholic (magisterial) social teaching's division of ethics into public and private creates a structural lacuna which makes it almost impossible to envision a truly just situation for migrant domestic careworkers (MDCs) within the current horizon of Catholic social thought. Drawing on a variety of sociological studies, I conclude that it is easy for MDCs to “disappear” between two countries, two families, and, finally, two sets of ethical norms. If the magisterium genuinely wishes Catholic ethicists to address (...) the plight of these migrant women, normative Catholic social teaching must pay more attention to household sociological realities and more fully absorb the feminist critique of the sharp line between the public and the private, between care and paid work. (shrink)

Can feminists count on welfare states—or at least some aspects of these complex systems—as resources in the struggle for gender equality? Gender analysts of "welfare states" investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. Feminist scholars have moved to bring the contingent practice of politics back into grounded fields of action and social change and away from the reification and abstractions that had come to dominate (...) models of politics focused on "big" structures and systems, including those focused on "welfare states." Conceptual innovations and reconceptualizations of foundational terms have been especially prominent in the comparative scholarship on welfare states, starting with gender, and including care, autonomy, citizenship, dependence, political agency, and equality. In contrast to other subfields of political science and sociology, gendered insights have to some extent been incorporated into mainstream comparative scholarship on welfare states. The arguments between feminists and mainstream scholars over the course of the last two decades have been productive, powering the development of key themes and concepts pioneered by gender scholars, including "defamilialization," the significance of unpaid care work in families and the difficulties of work-family "reconciliation," gendered welfare state institutions, the relation between fertility and women's employment, and the partisan correlates of different family and gender policy models. Yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency, and interdependency. Thus, the agenda of gendering comparative welfare state studies remains unfinished. To develop an understanding of what might be needed to finish that agenda, I assess the gendered contributions to the analysis of modern systems of social provision, starting with the concept of gender itself then moving to studies of the gendered division of labor and of gendered political power. (shrink)

The feminization of care migration in transnational contexts has received a great deal of attention. Scholars, however, have been slow to investigate a similar trend in intranational contexts. This article expands existing research on global care chains by examining the gendered emotional labor of migrant domestic workers pertaining to China’s intranational care chains. While the former often foregrounds “racial or ethnic discounting,” the latter is characterized by “citizenly discounting” whereby migrant domestic workers are subject to an overarching system of alienation, (...) subordination, and exploitation owning to their second-class rural hùkŏu status. Drawing on a participant-observation study of nannies, this article highlights how the intersection of gender and rural-urban citizenship is the key to grasping China’s migrant domestic workers’ experiences of extensive alienation at the nexus of work, family, and wider society. By delving into a particular set of political, economic, and cultural forces in the Chinese context, the article makes a distinctive contribution to a more nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of the interface of gender, emotional labor, and care migration. (shrink)

In the wake of Foucault, the debate on biopolitics has focused on the tensions of bíos and zoé, community and immunity, generation and thanatopolitics. What remains obscure in these accounts is the experiential aspect of life – its unfolding and entanglement with the ageing process. This is true both of approaches that emphasize the ethical implications of the life sciences and those that explore the biopolitical workings of wider social processes. In the contemporary capitalist formation, life’s unfolding is caught up (...) in global flows of information, finance and labour. The organization of the human faculties, the general preconditions for knowledge and communication, becomes central to value creation. And the human body, like fixed capital for Marx, becomes a cost to be amortized as quickly as possible. Investigating these processes with regard to transformations in practices of care provides a means for reassessing current debates regarding the ageing of people and populations. (shrink)