The bodily ambiguity of social reproduction: Navigating body work in migrant eldercare

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show the systematic relevance of corporeal features of care by drawing upon the experiences of Croatian eldercare workers employed in Austrian and German households through a live-in programme which has recently become a common way of employment for the women coming from the impoverished regions of Europe. Even when eldercare is discussed in the context of growing migration flows, its daily performance and somatic components have rarely been taken seriously enough and productively linked to the global movements. Therefore, the caregivers? experiences are analysed here by relying on the scholarship on ?body work? (activities having human body as working material), which are then contextualised within the larger socio-economic environment of neoliberalism. Since live-ins not only point to, but also ?solve? systematic contradictions in organizing eldercare (e.g., the gap between the desired image of caring environment and practical conditions) - by either covering up the empty spot left by potential providers of care or extending the quality of that care - I argue that attentiveness to the details of the bodies being worked upon is one point of departure from which micro and macro can be analysed in a close correlation to each other, providing a novel bodily insight into world economic restructuring.