Pedagogies of Affect: Docility and Deference in the Making of Immigrant Women Subjects

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, I examine the colonization of women’s intimate labor. Focusing on care work in a global perspective, I analyze how intimacy becomes a pedagogical focus in the training of foreign nurses. This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted through a government-funded pilot project to help foreign-trained nurses become licensed in Toronto, Ontario. While accounts of affect and labor have considered the role of gender, here I seek to bring these important studies into conversation with race- and gender-making processes in global contexts, which say more about Western notions of both femininity and the Other than about immigrant women themselves. I argue that classes for foreign-educated nurses employ what I call pedagogies of affect, which reproduce a racialized notion of femininity predicated on Western notions of docility and deference. These affective dispositions are cultivated not only in relation to doctors and those higher in the hierarchy but also in relation to patient...