Care Work in Transition: Transnational Circuits of Gender, Migration, and Care

Abstract

This article presents a broad overview of the emerging field of scholarship on gender, migration and care work. The first section provides a rationale for linking the embodied intimate labor of sex workers and surrogate mothers to more traditional caregiving among nannies, nurses and eldercare aids. Through an intersectional optic on power and domination in care workers’ everyday lives, we highlight the ways in which love’s labor is lost and devalued in the sphere of the home as workplace, the family and community as employer, the state as labor recruiter, and the labor market as a site of ethnic boundaries and exclusions. Distinguishing different types of care and its institutional and geographic location matters in explaining current care in transition. Care work, in many domains, has become appropriated by markets. We consider how political, institutional, and cultural factors have shaped, and are reshaping, the ideas and norms of care in the context of transnational care worker migration. Too often, studies of gendered care migration fail to account for the differential impacts of state migration and care policies for women across class and social status within single country contexts. Care workers are beginning to challenge new forms of commodified care work. The final section explores how grassroots efforts to organize and advocate for the rights of domestic workers have evolved in countries in both the Global North and South.