Migrant domestic workers and the household division of intimate labour: reconfiguring eldercare relations in Singapore

Abstract

As Singapore confronts escalating demands for eldercare labour in the face of rapid ageing, families are increasingly resorting to market-based, gender-normative options predicated on the care-chain migration of women to resolve familial care deficits. At the same time, given the prevalence of discourses of Asian familialism, the abdication of eldercare responsibilities to non-familial caregivers whose labour is purchased through market transactions often raises social anxieties decrying the decline of filial piety. This paper explores the way eldercare work is choreographed around gendered performances of intimate labour by different household members as families work through market solutions and moral dilemmas around eldercare. Following conceptualisation of the intimate that configure it along lines of mobility, emotion, materiality, belonging, alienation, we use the term intimate labour to refer to work involving embodied interactions that shape the social reproduction of everyday life. The paper is based on in-depth interviews with 34 elderly persons ‘cared for’ by foreign domestic workers and 35 foreign domestic workers employed to ‘care for’ the elderly. First, we examine the way families articulate the care logics behind the everyday division of intimate labour between live-in foreign domestic workers and spatially proximate family caregivers. Second, we show how the daily choreography of intimate labour and exchange among different household members folds into reshaping and relativizing affinal connections between ‘carer’ and ‘cared-for’ in the global household. Ultimately, we argue that home-based eldercare serve to rigidify the gendered contours of the ‘woman-carer model’ of care.