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Migration, domestic work and affect: A decolonial approach on value and the feminization of labor
Abstract
Domestic and care work in private households is now the largest employment sector for migrant women. This book sheds light on these households through its focus on the interpersonal relationships between Latin American "undocumented migrant" domestic workers and employers in Austria, Germany, Spain and the UK. The personal experiences of these women form the basis for Gutiérrez-Rodríguez's decolonial analysis of the feminization of labor in private households and cultural analysis of domestic work as affective labor. This book will be a necessary voice in the debates on citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and migrant workers' rights.
... Si bien se han estudiado las emociones en las migraciones, como también en el trabajo doméstico, las emociones en trabajadoras domésticas migrantes es un ámbito menormente investigado y se presenta en este momento como un campo en expansión . Trabajos pioneros que mencionaron las emociones de las trabajadoras domésticas migrantes son los de Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001) y Parreñas (2001, y solo más adelante empezaron sus emociones a ser objeto de análisis (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010Ariza, 2016;González Fernández, 2016;López, 2020;Cuéllar, 2020;Garcés, Leiva y Comelin, 2021). ...
... La primera refuerza la actitud servil y sumisa de las trabajadoras domésticas al considerar los afectos desplegados en una cultura que se reconoce por valorar la familia y la cohesión familiar, sobre todo en las mujeres que son las que asumen las tareas de cuidado. La segunda fortalece la idea de superioridad y dominación del pasado colonial, frente a la racialización generizada y subordinada de un trabajo doméstico que se vincula con la esclavitud y el andrea comelin-Fornés, sandra leiva-gómez y carolina garcés-estrada servilismo (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010 que se solicita a quien desempeña la labor y por la cual le pagan (Hochschild, 1983). ...
El capítulo “Trabajo doméstico y de cuidado migrante: culturas emocionales en tensión” se centran en visibilizar la cultura emocional de trabajadoras domésticas bolivianas migrantes, que desempeñan labores de cuidado en la región de Tarapacá, ubicada en el norte de Chile, así como en la gestión de emociones asociada a dicha cultura. Desde un abordaje que retoma los aportes de la sociología de las emociones de Arlie R. Hochschild y en base a la realización de 25 entrevistas en profundidad durante 2018 y 2019 a trabajadoras domésticas bolivianas migrantes, las autoras evidencian una situación de extrema vulnerabilidad laboral derivada de un conjunto de factores de discriminación que actúan simultáneamente, como el género, la clase y la etnia, a los que se suman los resabios del pasado colonial, unas condiciones de empleo precarizadas, un estatus migratorio que les impide el acceso a un contrato de trabajo, y el hecho de que su espacio laboral sea a la vez el espacio privado de su empleadora. En este contexto, el trabajo emocional implicado en el trabajo doméstico y de cuidados es invisibilizado y se produce en el marco de relaciones de subordinación y servilismo. Las autoras advierten sobre la necesidad de reconocer esta dimensión del trabajo de cuidados de gran exigencia para las trabajadoras del sector. El capítulo aporta evidencia sobre la desigualdad de poder que caracteriza de manera omnipresente la cultura emocional del trabajo doméstico migrante en Chile, que demanda un trabajo emocional muy exigente y permanente, de manera implícita y sin parámetros claros presentes, lo cual exige su regulación y una
mayor presencia estatal en la garantía del derecho a cuidar y trabajar en condiciones dignas.
... Within this group of scholarship, Merrill (2011) (Clark, 2017;Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010;Mitchell, 1996). However, there is a research gap in how dehumanization in the labour process occurs in European, non-colonial contexts under current neoliberal capitalism, particularly in border regions (cf. ...
... The bloodsucker metaphor turned up once again in an interview, as our interviewee described the "indigenous"-newcomer relation- In the Hungarian case, ethnicity, nationality, and gender are particularly significant in the social boundary-making of migrant labour concerning dehumanization. The main difference from previously analysed postcolonial and settler colonial contexts (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010;Mitchell, 1996) is the prevalence of the ethnicity/ nationality divide, that is, differentiating between ethnic Hungarians living abroad and non-Hungarians of other nationalities. The Roma/non-Roma difference also dominated labour dehumanization, corresponding with previous empirical literature about Hungary (Kovai, 2019;Rajaram, 2018). ...
The region of West Hungary surrounding Sopron has experienced large migrant worker inflows from rural Hungary and neighbouring countries into low‐skilled jobs in pre‐COVID‐19 years. This research interviewed workers, labour market intermediaries, employers, and hosts to explore how the fundamental humanity of migrant workers is denied in the labour process. The paper draws on geographical research examining the embodied agency of workers and analyses the literature on dehumanization to highlight the construction of dehumanization narratives in the social relations of migrant recruitment, training, employment, and accommodation. Theoretically, the paper argues that production and reproduction sites require consideration when examining the dehumanization of migrant labour. The empirical part of the paper contributes to the literature by unpacking various dehumanization strategies involving social boundary‐making based on nationality, ethnicity, and gender.
... social reproduction' or, more narrowly defined, the 'crisis of care' is thus experienced differently depending on what urban household one belongs to (Fraser, 2016;Hester, 2018). In the face of enduring cuts to publicly provisioned social reproductive services and a 'post-Fordist sexual contract' that expects women to excel both as mothers and as entrepreneurial professionals (Adkins, 2016), white middle-class households have increasingly turned to the market to outsource their reproductive tasks (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). As formal and informal markets for domestic work expand, they not only generate income opportunities for working-class minority and migrant households but also intensify their social reproductive challenges (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). ...
... In the face of enduring cuts to publicly provisioned social reproductive services and a 'post-Fordist sexual contract' that expects women to excel both as mothers and as entrepreneurial professionals (Adkins, 2016), white middle-class households have increasingly turned to the market to outsource their reproductive tasks (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). As formal and informal markets for domestic work expand, they not only generate income opportunities for working-class minority and migrant households but also intensify their social reproductive challenges (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). Moreover, it has been extensively documented how such feminized and racialized reproductive labour is highly precarious, un(der)-regulated and subject to exploitation by employers and labour market intermediaries alike (for example, Glenn, 1992;Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003;McGrath and DeFilippis, 2009). ...
... This research uses interviews with servicewomen to explore how they understand femininity and feminine identities in a highly gendered context, with findings indicating that servicewomen sacrifice femininity when they experience femmephobia but emphasize femininity when placed in gender essentialized military roles. Overall disdain for femininity and denigration of feminine-coded behaviors encourages the devaluation of feminine-coded work like caregiving (Block et al., 2018;Calarco, 2023;Dwyer, 2013;Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010;Prioletta & Davies, 2024) and supporting roles, which women in many contexts are expected to perform. In the military context, historically segregated gender training and the exclusion of women from combat roles have confined them to support positions, which are considered less prestigious than combat and warrior roles (Cohn, 2000). ...
Using in-depth interviews with 50 U.S. servicewomen, this study explores how institutional values, peer surveillance, and social control in the form of harassment function to devalue and regulate femininity in the military space. In a context that takes an essentialist view of gender that conflates femininity with weakness and assumes the ideal servicemember is masculine, many servicewomen respond by sacrificing femininity to avoid workplace harassment and to try to fit in. Women not only suppress feminine identity markers but also engage in defensive othering and posturing against other servicemembers perceived as more feminine to distance themselves further from femininity, reinforcing the gender binary. Further, this study uses interviews with women who served on Female Engagement Teams ( fet ) and Lioness Teams to highlight additional organizational meanings around femininity. While these programs were framed by the military as humanitarian in nature, fet and Lioness team members used essentialist views of gender to claim their femininity made them superior at intelligence-gathering, counterinsurgency, and combat missions. While this enables them to contest the masculine ideal of a servicemember, it ultimately leaves the gender binary intact. Overall, the military’s adherence to gender essentialism, coupled with a femmephobic environment, functions to regulate femininity in ways that uphold both the gender binary and a hierarchy that privileges masculinity over femininity.
... Aunque usó el término queer en una de sus primeras publicaciones -"La Prieta" (1981)-y su escritura ha sido utilizada desde finales de la década de 1990 en Estados Unidos dentro de las teorías Phelan (1997), Chela Sandoval (2000) y Roderick A. Ferguson (2003), entre otrxs autorxs, y asimismo ha sido discutida en el contexto germanohablante y multilingüe en el marco de la crítica feminista del sujeto por autoras como Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (1999Rodríguez ( , 2010 (Anzaldúa 2015c: 59-76). Como su título indica, esta antología no se centra en las teorías queer, pero las editoras Isabel Exner y Gudrun Rath (2015) sitúan el capítulo 7 de Borderlands/La Frontera como una de las "reflexiones pioneras desde las Américas" que abre "horizontes de posibilidad respecto a un posicionamiento crítico dentro [...] del pensamiento de la cultura en/ desde/hacia América Latina" (Exner y Rath 2015: 12, 20) a través de la nueva conciencia mestiza. ...
A partir de fragmentos del comentario de nuestra traducción colectiva „Grenzen übersetzen, translatorisches Handeln, Brückensprachen schaffen“ [Traducir fronteras, actuar de manera traslativa, crear lenguas puente] de Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) de Gloria Anzaldúa pretendemos mostrar el impacto del comentario de traducción como forma de articulación que se declara responsable de la construcción de sentido y subjetividad en el texto traducido; y al mismo tiempo, exponer nuestras estrategias y explicar algunos de los procesos y conceptos que intervinieron en la traducción para subvertir las tendencias homogeneizadoras a partir de características centrales de los textos de Anzaldúa, que son portadores de multilingüismo, ambigüedad y contradicciones. Además, nos preguntamos hasta qué punto el uso del multilingüismo hizo que los textos de Anzaldúa se convirtieran en contribuciones tan importantes a los estudios queer —entre otros— incluso antes de que fueran introducidos en los espacios académicos.
... Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2010: 2) asocia el crecimiento de la demanda de trabajo doméstico con la entrada de las mujeres al mercado laboral. En este sentido, el conflicto que describe la novela puede interpretarse desde una perspectiva interseccional, donde intervienen la raza, el género y la clase. ...
El presente artículo presenta un análisis de Ceniza en la boca, de Brenda Navarro, como una novela política que expone el racismo y la xenofobia de la sociedad española. Son dos los focos de interés: en primer lugar, el retrato que la novela realiza de la crisis del sistema de cuidados y, en segundo lugar, los mecanismos empleados para representar la violencia xenófoba y racista. Concluiremos explorando las prácticas de resistencia al poder propuestas en la novela. Entre ellas, destaca el ejercicio literario como forma de reconfiguración de la realidad
... Research has shown that the lack of sexual redistribution of social reproduction work has given rise to a demand for women's labour in both the Global North and South and resulted in a global transfer of care, domestic labour, and sex work (Morokvasic, 2007(Morokvasic, , 2013Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003;Parreñas, 2001). Despite these debates, there has been little research into new Spanish migration from a gender and feminist perspective (Muñoz- Rodríguez andSantos Ortega, 2015, 2018;Oso, 2017;Cortés et al., 2019, 2021Capote Lamas and Fernández Suárez, 2021). ...
The global economic crisis that began in 2008 led to major cuts to the welfare state in Spain and across Europe (Gambino, 2018), affecting key areas such as health, education, social care and youth employment. This was accompanied by drastic reductions in public spending and welfare benefits, which affected women particularly severely. Through ethnographic fieldwork with a gender and feminist perspective, this paper attempts to cast light on the trajectories of young Spanish women who emigrated to London in the ambiguous ‘au pair’ category. The figure of the au pair is interesting because it is an ad hoc, liminal, ambiguous, transient construction configured in such a way that it is ‘between’ categories, spaces and bounds, responding to the domestic care needs of English families’ offspring as part of a commodification of care brought about by a lack of regulation and resources from the state. The employment trajectories and strategies of young Spanish women are embedded in a context of precarious employment, in which young women with secondary and higher education seek financial and personal autonomy but are compelled to negotiate gender norms in order to overcome structural inequalities that increasingly devalue care work. The naturalisation of care and its attribution to women, as well as the ongoing association of women with the ‘good mother’ model, serves to reinforce gender hierarchies.
... Accordingly, the act of translation implies not only working with someone else's text but also interrogating the relationships of power in place allowing or hindering this dialogue. As I have discussed elsewhere ( Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2006, 2008, 2010, global inequalities and (post)colonial relationships shape the conditions of communication and exchange. The positionality of the translator and the speaker does not exist in a vacuum of power relations; instead, it is shaped by social hierarchies and relationships replete with power imbalance. ...
... Esta perspectiva no solo complica la configuración de subjetividades en un mundo móvil, donde las condiciones de trabajo se desregularizan y la precariedad se convierte en denominador común, sino que también enfatiza las especificidades geopolíticas e históricas contextuales en donde se forman las identidades. De tal manera, este enfoque resulta bastante interesante en lo que refiere a identidades que cruzan fronteras, debido a que las condiciones que construyen e impactan esas identidades están configuradas por los contextos específicos que les dieron vida (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010). ...
... Profit-oriented gig economy platforms make use of this social malaise to realise new surplus opportunities in a largely unregulated market that is mainly occupied by a female migrant workforce under precarious conditions. This "care fix" (Dowling, 2022) allows for the continuous pursuit of profitability, sustains the gendered division of domestic chores, and signifies an ongoing coloniality of labour (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010. Platform-based household work thus becomes a "hyper-commodified form of labour" (Wood et al., 2019) and the domestic service market a site of multiple exploitations, in many cases perpetuating economic inequalities as well as gendered class dynamics (Haas, 2001). ...
Previous studies show that gig economy-based work opens up new ways in which inequalities are (re)produced. In this context , it is particularly important to look at female cleaners in private households, where gender inequalities intersect with other axes of disadvantage such as class, migratory experience, or ascribed ethnicity. This spatially and linguistically fragmented group presents challenges for scientific research, which is reflected in insufficient data available to date. The aim of the project GigClean-from which research for this article is drawn-is to address this gap. The guiding research question is: How do domestic cleaners in the informal labour market experience working in the gig economy? The methodological design consists of 15 problem-centred interviews with platform-based cleaning labourers in private households in Vienna, who predominantly operate in the informal economy. Our results suggest that undeclared domestic work via online platforms is associated with increased power gaps between workers and clients as well as changing working conditions to the detriment of cleaners. Specifically, three recurring themes could be identified: reserve army mechanisms; lookism, objec-tification, and sexual harassment; and information asymmetry and control.
... Esta perspectiva sostiene que esta labor es tanto un trabajo productivo como reproductivo central para el desarrollo del capitalismo. Esta línea se actualiza en los estudios sobre economía y sociedad de Federici (2012), Gutiérrez (2010), Fraser (2016) y Pérez-Orozco (2006), que entienden que las formas actuales de precarización de la vida se sustentan en las tareas feminizadas. A su vez, los feminismos radicales (Firestone 1970) cuestionaron cómo el sistema patriarcal supone y se basa en la figura de la familia nuclear que, a través del control de la sexualidad y el trabajo de las mujeres, permite la articulación entre familia, economía y Estado. ...
Reseña de Rosario Fernández Ossandón del libro Workers Like All the Rest of Them. Domestic Service and the Rights of Labor in Twentieth-Century Chile, de Elizabeth Q. Hutchison. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.
... Pero sería el carácter afectivo, su capacidad de afectar, lo que también contribuiría a formas sensibles y cotidianas en que la clase social se contorna en diálogo con discursos nacionales sobre lo doméstico, la familia y la maternidad. Así, el trabajo doméstico sería trabajo emocional al producir emociones o reproducir la vida pero también sería trabajo afectivo pues permite vincular sensaciones y sentires con proyectos nacionales (Gutiérrez 2010). ...
... An "unsettling" of care, as Michelle Murphy suggests, is meant to challenge "gestures of rescue" (2015, 721) often recapitulating colonial legacies in which care discourses have been instrumental to control and subjugate whole populations (Narayan 1995;Raghuram, Madge, and Noxolo 2009;Raghuram 2016). To investigate colonial care, a specific form of "uncaring care" (Tronto 2020, 190), which is deeply imbricated with neoliberal racial capitalism, I build on the work of care scholars who have engaged with power differentials in care relations (Duffy 2011;Glenn 2010;Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010), located in worlds that are not just racially diverse but highly unequal, to paraphrase Parvati Raghuram (2019, 629). I also build on the work of colleagues who discuss care and paternalism (F. ...
This article adds to critiques of discourses and practices of care that are enmeshed with coloniality. It does so via examining the prominent model of helping marginalized people through giving them the opportunity to care for themselves and their own by being recruited into paid (care) work, thus, becoming “useful” participants in society. This usefulness is read as a colonial project of subordinate inclusion into neoliberal racial capitalism. A perverse ideology of care is mobilized to extract surplus value from marginalized workers “integrated” into the lower echelons of social reproduction. Using historic and contemporary examples, the argument is developed in three steps: First, I discuss how care workers are included via subordination. Second, I analyze how an inversion of care receiver and caregiver transforms marginalized care workers into recipients of integration measures, rendering their care work invisible. Third, I show how racial usefulness, the interpellation that racialized workers be/come “useful,” is undergirded by productivism within neoliberal racial capitalism.
... Vor allem Letztere kritisieren jedoch die Care-Literatur für ihren Fokus auf weiße, bürgerliche Frauen im Globalen Norden und zeigen, wie sehr Care-Arbeit rassifiziert ist (Davis 1983). Koloniale und rassistische Machtverhältnisse haben dazu beigetragen, wie der Artikel von Christa Wichterich ebenfalls eindrücklich zeigt, dass rassifizierte Frauen bis heute Care-Arbeit unter prekären Bedingungen verrichten (Anderson 2000;Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010). Zudem haben dekoloniale Forscher*innen darauf hingewiesen, dass die globale vergeschlechtlichte Arbeitsteilung und damit einhergehende Konzepte, wie das Ideal der weiblichen Häuslichkeit, im Rahmen des Kolonialismus durchgesetzt und normalisiert wurden (Banerjee 2010, 459). ...
Die Covid-19-Pandemie hat bestehende strukturelle Ungleichheitsverhältnisse innerhalb der Gesellschaften vertieft und soziale Krisen noch deutlicher zutage gebracht. Die bereits bestehende Care-Krise und ihre Verschärfung haben maßgeblich dazu beigetragen. Dabei wird die zusätzliche unbezahlte Sorgearbeit und -verantwortung nach wie vor maßgeblich von Frauen getragen. Im vorliegenden Beitrag setzen wir uns mit dem Begriff der Sorge theoretisch auseinander und gehen auf den aktuellen Forschungsstand zu Sorge in Zeiten der Pandemie ein. Dabei beleuchten wir durch eine care-ethische Perspektive die relationalen Aspekte von Sorgearbeit und zeigen mit einer dekolonialen Perspektive die Kontinuität kolonialer Ungleichheiten in der Verteilung von Sorgearbeit auf. Abschließend reflektieren wir über die politische Steuerung von Care und Corona und deren Grenzen.
Drawing on the theoretical frameworks on intersectionality and the related notion of vulnerability, this article analyses the Fireworks Factory decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Mahlangu decision of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, considering them as significant examples of putting into practice the intersectional approach in the legal context. Both these judgments recognise the relevance of this analytical perspective in understanding discrimination on multiple grounds, focusing on their structural dimensions, related vulnerabilities and social inequalities. The article shows how intersectionality is used in these decisions as a tool to analyse the negative impacts of the interplay of various forms of discrimination, but also to grasp the specific subordination and oppression that arise from their intersection, which are often inadequately addressed by the law and its judicial enforcement.
“Migration” has received less attention in social theory compared to other topics, and at the same time, migration research is often said to have a “theory deficit.” Against this background, we argue that it is mutually beneficial to relate and link social theory and migration research more closely. On the one hand, a stronger reference to social theories is important for migration research to break down prevailing views on migration and to further develop independent analytical perspectives and concepts that allow for a critical-reflexive distance to (national-)state and hegemonic categories. These established categories often go hand in hand with undercomplex, essentialist notions of society, as in dominant integration discourses. In social theory, on the other hand, migration is rarely addressed, with hardly any debates in migration research discussed. When migration is addressed, it is mostly to illustrate theoretical concepts and theses, without sufficiently considering the complexity of migration phenomena. In this introductory article, we outline how we can revise perspectives and categories of migration studies based on a rearticulation of social theories and, conversely, how we can rethink theoretical approaches starting from a perspective of migration (studies).
How do Mexican-American women in the US-Mexico borderlands respond to insecurity relating to multiple forms of discrimination? The present article compares the experiences of women of different class and ethnic backgrounds to analyze their gendered watchfulness in response to the racialized and classed anti-immigrant vigilance of privileged Anglo-Americans. We argue that, in a context of ongoing coloniality, maintaining an exploitable racialized and gendered sub-worker class requires conjuring the illusion of the border as a necessary security feature. Mexican-American women's watchfulness strategies, including professionalism, beauty practices, and artistic performances, instead makes visible the ways in which the border as the margin of the state actively produces insecurity and violence. Viewing security from the margins of the margins allows us to expand and decolonize previous understandings.
While the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état against the government of Salvador Allende in Chile invites to reflect on past and current experiences of solidarity between Latin America and Europe, the present contribution seeks to foreground the rather overlooked international solidarity efforts of and with the indigenous Mapuche. As a result of their forced exile to Europe after 1973, Mapuche activists began to organise themselves as a diasporic community in Europe and to form a transnational advocacy network in support of their people. This contribution aims to showcase how international solidarity of and with the Mapuche in Europe evolved over time, how they relate to non-indigenous, Chilean solidarity networks, and which underlying Mapuche notions of solidarity they reactivate in order to weave their transnational advocacy network.
Migration is a topic of heated debate, yet it is relatively absent from sociological theory discussions. This article analyzes the extent to which structural de-thematization or specific framing of migration shapes sociological perspectives by focusing on approaches that have been canonized as “classics.” Through a rereading of Karl Marx, Max Weber, and W. E. B. Du Bois, I address absences and show how these authors have nevertheless constructed certain figures of migration: as a passive figure of forced mobility, a threatening figure of otherness, and an active figure of social transformation. How these authors depict migration is both symptomatic of their approach but also of a contemporary sociological and sociopolitical discourse that can be critically reflected in relation to these works. By showing how migration is treated in these different intellectual projects, the article contributes to a genealogy of sociological thought and its impact on contemporary perspectives regarding migration, diversity, and inequality.
Analyzing interviews I completed with twenty-two Bengali Hindu women in Kolkata, India, this chapter argues that these women’s valuing of domestic shrine traditions as an affective labor enables them to interpret themselves as skilled ritual authorities. I suggest that by interpreting affect as a skill necessary to devotion and themselves as having unique affective capacities, the women I worked with position themselves as religious authorities. Much as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s notion of affective labor (2000), and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Updated with a New Preface, 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press (2012) notion of emotional work, the women I worked with in Kolkata described their domestic shrine traditions as demanding their management of their own affect in order to create an attitude of love for and sustain a relationship with their deities. This reading of domestic worship is consistent with discourses of bhakti, or Hindu devotion, that characterize devotion as an affective endeavor. Importantly, bhakti traditions have also suggested that women have a unique capacity for devotion because they are viewed as being naturally more emotional and willing to serve than men. Notably, the women I interviewed in Kolkata explicitly professed these very gender essentialisms to frame themselves as superior devotionalists in comparison to both the men of their households and temple priests.
Households seeking childcare often turn to labour market intermediaries such as placement agencies and digital platforms to facilitate their search. This article draws on a qualitative research project to examine the respective roles played by agencies and platforms, comparing the structural power dynamics they engender between workers, clients, and intermediaries. First, it argues that digital platforms stand in an ambiguous position in relation to the formalisation of childcare. While they have contributed to reducing transaction costs and standardising processes, this has often been through the creation of more flexible and insecure forms of work compared with agencies. Second, in contrast with literature emphasising the disciplinary effects of platforms, we claim that they institute new forms of ‘constrained flexibility’, which have increased workers’ access to jobs, control over their schedule and communication with clients, while simultaneously subjecting them to increased market pressures and requiring higher levels of digital and entrepreneurial skills.
This article addresses the gap in sociological theory concerning the politics of ‘migration’ – even though this area of politics and the debates surrounding it are of social salience and relevance. Both in social theory (the question of what society actually is or how it is constituted) and in the social analysis of modernity, the topic of migration plays a role no more than en passent. Nevertheless, there are sociological theories that allow us to shed light on debates, practices, institutions, and infrastructures of migration. The article focuses on poststructuralist and postcolonial theories in order to think modern society as ‘society of migration’, i.e. as a society which is constituted by the production of migration and migrants, as well as by the migrant subjects themselves.
Migrants in a temporary legal status are subject to heterogeneous techniques of bordering accompanied by assumptions of migratory intention and behaviour. This article analyses migrants’ struggles around administrative bordering among non-EU/EEA migrants who hold one-year student residence permits in Finland. I focus on the ongoing labour of reproducing a ‘legally legible self’ as a perspective for approaching the subjective encounters with the border regime. Rather than merely analysing the impacts of the residence permit on social life, the article centres on the efforts of student permit holders to maintain the right to a continued legally regularized stay in Finland, addressed through a social reproduction lens. The argument is that viewing migrants’ efforts of reproducing a legally legible self through the perspective of social reproduction, and thus analysing the labour of attention and care that goes into reproducing one’s legal status, we can acquire a more nuanced understanding of the everyday struggles around administrative bordering. The article contributes first to the theorization of social reproduction beyond the walls of the home, by demonstrating how bordering processes intimately shape migrants’ opportunities for reproducing their lives, and secondly, by emphasizing life-making as a battlefield, the article adds to the research on administrative border struggles.
More than a special issue, this endeavor serves as a sourcebook and provocation amplifying embryonic but interlinked sites of inquiry: LatinXness in Spain and its vital conversation with US LatinX studies as well as Iberian studies. LatinXs share historical and cultural connections to the Spanish and American empires. The contemporary period marks a significant moment on both sides of the Atlantic, as Spain now houses Europe’s largest LatinX population and the shifting ground of LatinXness exceeds the United States as well as a North-South axis of analysis. With an eye toward being wide-ranging, bringing forward fresh insights, and offering a crucial reference for an expanding area of interest—transatlantic LatinX studies—this undertaking provides historical contexts, defining moments, conceptual parameters, and critical approaches that appraise how Spain’s sociocultural and intellectual climate has fully entered a LatinX epoch. The exploration faces a cluster of questions: What do current characterizations of Spanishness invigorate when it admits a long ignored—and inseparable—LatinX foundation? What constitutes Spanish national currency when animated by LatinX bodies and imaginations? What is Spain—and what is Europe—to LatinXness and the Global South? What kind of new Spain—and new Europe—emerge from LatinXness and Global Southness? Collected here are original arguments and contributions—academic articles, think pieces, critical conversations, poetry, and creative nonfiction—orienting us on central thematic concerns that include: new directions and perspectives in transatlantic LatinX studies; the idea of Europe and Europeanness from Spain’s southernmost archipelago, the Canary Islands; LatinX nonhuman origins at the Royal Botanical Garden in the Spanish capital; the history, uses, and dissemination of the Panchito/Panchita racial slur; Madrid’s twenty-first century LatinX Spanish language, migration, and culture; present-day brown drag performance and practices; Afro-Spanish-Colombian poetry and politics; rurality, depopulation, and LatinX repopulation in Aguaviva, Spain; diasporic bodies and expressions of identity through movement; and movement in translation, X equivalencies across bodies, geographies, and languages. The volume, as a whole, is an entry point into LatinX studies and Iberian studies marshaling ideas and thinking tools that may be veering toward a new field of study.
Non‐standard employment (NSE) is well‐documented in the domestic sector in all European countries. The precariousness and poor working conditions of this sector reflect in a labour force composed by the most vulnerable layers of the labour market, namely, migrant women. This article analyses how and to what extent a macro‐level factor, that is, the gender regime (resulting from the interplay of gender equality and gendered social norms) interacts with micro‐level individual and occupational characteristics to shape the prevalence of NSE in the domestic sector in Europe. We use the 2019 EU‐LFS data and run a set of logistic regression analyses. Our results show that NSE is a defining feature of domestic sector, and that migrant women are at a higher risk of being in this type of employment, especially in destination countries where gender equality is relatively lower and expectations concerning care and family responsibilities are more traditional.
This article uses the analytical lens of ( in)dependency conundrum to highlight how asylum seekers in refugee camps are pushed to be self‐reliant while, however, their autonomous social reproduction activities and spaces of liveability are hindered. Focusing on Greece, it intertwines critical migration scholarship with feminist geography literature on unpaid labour to investigate refugees’ obstructed social reproduction activities. It moves on by exploring the (in)dependency conundrum that refugees face in Greece from a condition of protracted carcerality enforced beyond detention. In the third section it highlights the continuum between social reproduction activities and other unpaid labours done by asylum seekers in camps, as a result of humanitarianism’ s subtle coercion. In the last section it draws attention to refugees’ collective mobilisations in Greek refugee camps: raising punctual demands about food and accommodation, they articulated expansive claims about their right to autonomous social reproduction activities and to build infrastructures of liveability.
Rassismus ist Realität – auch in der pluralen Gesellschaft Deutschlands. Doch was braucht es, um Rassismus zu erfassen, zu erforschen und politische sowie zivilgesellschaftliche Antworten auf ihn zu finden? Die Beiträger*innen liefern einen interdisziplinären Überblick zu grundlegenden Perspektiven, Theorien und Forschungsansätzen für eine zeitgemäße Rassismusforschung. Die im Rahmen des Nationalen Diskriminierungs- und Rassismusmonitors (NaDiRa) entstandenen Analysen bieten unverzichtbare und einzigartige Erkenntnisse zu Ursachen, Ausmaß und Folgen des Rassismus in Deutschland.
In Denmark, heightened public interest surrounding migration politics has become embodied in the arts, leading to the development of migration-related arts projects. In this study we explore the experiences of women taking part in an arts-based integration project designed for migrant and Danish women to knit, sew, and crochet in female company, with a view to professionalise their handicrafts. Our findings, which are grounded in ethnographic fieldwork as well as interviews with members of the group, demonstrate how handicraft acts as a prism through which categories such as gender, class, and ethnicity are negotiated within the project. We found that group members’ national and cultural backgrounds shaped their different expectations and experiences in the project. The roles they occupied and their self-perception within the group were also shaped by other factors, such as their family status, their state of employment, and whether handicraft was more of a ‘hobby’ or a source of income. The study makes a case for appreciating the importance of social recognition. Understanding how these women perceived their own and each other’s work becomes a magnifier of the socio-political context in which the integration project is situated. Artistic practice both enabled members to respond to an integration and refugee discourse, while simultaneously positioning them within such frameworks.
This article examines the link between outsourcing social reproduction and the valuation of time by approaching the employers of domestic workers as workers who themselves labour to produce surplus value. It contributes to current research on outsourcing social reproduction, which emphasizes the (re)privatization of public services, by situating outsourcing within the sphere of production. The analysis is based on in-depth qualitative research on employers of migrant care and domestic workers in Finland (N = 31). Developing an integrated link between migrant workers’ labour-power and employers’ labour-power, we demonstrate that the employers work a second shift of paid employment in the evening, enabled by the outsourcing of reproductive labour. We argue that outsourcing social reproduction often takes the form of purchasing inexpensive time, enabled by hiring migrant domestic workers, which those who outsource convert into productive labour-time, thereby subsidizing their own labour to increment economic value for capital. We analyse the ways in which outsourcing reproduction is organized to enhance the amount of productive social labour-time in a context where capital places increasing demands on labour.
This article explores autoethnography as a critical research methodology in dialogue with post- and decolonial critique. It draws on an (auto)ethnographic research on and within the transnational solidarity network of the Mapuche people in which encounters of solidarity across difference are understood as postcolonial “contact zones.” This contribution hereby suggests three important opportunities for autoethnographic positioning analysis by looking at (a) different layers of the author’s field access, (b) the author’s strategic membership within the international solidarity activism, and (c) experiences of being rejected. This article argues that the careful and systematic analysis of such ethnographic episodes is able to (a) generate important epistemological insights within a particular research field, in this case transnational solidarity and networked social movement activity, and (b) highlight and reflect upon the researcher’s “complicity” within fieldwork. The first part of this contribution briefly introduces post- and decolonial debates on solidarity across difference and moves on to suggesting autoethnographic positioning analysis as a methodological approach for studying/supporting the transnational solidarity activism, drawing upon the author’s research with the Mapuche.
The subject of this interdisciplinary research project is to determine the scope, forms and con-sequences of the expansion of human rights discourse in migration societies. MeDiMi’s starting observation is that actors in contemporary societies often refer to human rights norms discur-sively to articulate images of themselves as well as their interests. We refer to this process as “humanrightization” (Vermenschenrechtlichung).
MeDiMi traces the humanrightization of discourse in migration societies in three contexts. These contexts include the legal system, areas of political action, as well as other professional and everyday socio-cultural contexts in which perceptions of self and the attitudes of actors within migration societies are expressed and formed. Legal analysis, social-science research and cultural studies of ten selected fields will provide the empirical basis for a theory of discur-sive practices in migration societies. This will enable us to achieve a new understanding of the role of human rights in contemporary societies, especially European ones.
Historically, scholarship on domestic work in Africa has characterised the sector as oppressive. As an integral part of the oppressive nature of the domestic work domain, this article investigates the contradictions associated with the admirable act of employers paying their domestic workers more than recommended minimum wage in Eswatini. Previously known as Swaziland, Eswatini is a small, interlocked country between South Africa and Mozambique. The country’s recommended minimum wage for domestic workers is E 1,246.00 (USD 73.20) per month. Interviews were conducted among ten live-in domestic workers from Tubungu, Eswatini, who earn E 3,500 (USD 205.63) or more per month. This article relies on in-depth interviews to establish the dynamics at work in this act of constructive remuneration. The study’s findings challenge the assumption that higher paid wages in the domestic sector are always a well-intentioned and successful achievement of one aspect of the ‘decent work’ agenda. Findings show that higher wages subtly increase domestic workers’ tolerance of employers’ disregard of other working conditions. This is at the expense of the domestic workers’ well-being and pacifiers their ability to challenge their employers about other working conditions as their entitlement. The study shows how both liberating and oppressive experiences, not just oppression, coexist within the domestic work landscape in Eswatini. This points to an interesting ambiguity in the domestic work field. Finally, the study shows how these contradictory oppressive and liberatory experiences both inform and sustain domestic work in the country. This is in a context where women are part of a labour market with high unemployment, with domestic work being a convenient source of employment for less-skilled labour.
This article explores through qualitative methods how structural inequalities and weak welfare states push women to migrate in their old age to piece together their pension across different countries. Based on in-depth interviews, observations, and ethnographic conversations conducted with Romanian women in Spain, it explores how they navigate the European Union’s (UE) law on Social Security to aggregate social insurance periods from the work performed in different member states and therefore get entitled to a state pension. We analyze how the accumulation of vulnerabilities (related to class, gender, age, and ethnicity) shape the trajectories of these aging women in a context of structurally unequal welfare systems. The paper thus contributes to the transnational social protection field with a timely focus on old age formal arrangements within the EU and use of life-course approach to understand the reasons of related with social protection older migrant’s im/mobilities.
This article explores how young women born in Sweden, or arriving in Sweden as toddlers, who belong to the Latin American diaspora give meaning to and act on their experiences of being the daughters of migrant mothers, whose political activism shapes their views and practices of mothering and migration. The analysis is inspired by feminist/antiracist methodologies and consists of eight in-depth interviews with young adult women, all of them daughters of political refugees who came to Sweden to escape persecution by the military dictatorships in Latin America in the late 1970s. The interviews are combined with two focus groups that took place in the two largest Swedish cities. The category we will bring to light is that of the daughters; adults now, aged between thirty and forty-five (six of them mothers themselves). The central question in this article is what perceptions of mothering can be articulated from the perspective of daughters of Latin American migrant mothers, in a context where memories of political persecution and exile and experiences of institutional and everyday racism shape the conditions of motherwork for both the migrant mothers and their daughters.
The 2018 film Roma popularized the idea that domestic work is a site through which female employers and employees can support one another as they confront the relegation of reproductive labor to women. Echoes of this narrative can be heard in the workshops provided to Nahua men and women of the Huasteca region of Mexico by what I call gender trustees who are bent on modernizing rural men and women. This modernization is imagined as gender progress—one in which men and women come to redistribute housework and to adopt a dual earning marital model in which women work outside the home rather than as peasant women or housewives. These feminist notions of the good, therefore, demonstrate an affinity with neoliberal narratives of modernization that seek to move the Mexican rural population away from small‐scale farming and into the service and maquila sectors of the economy. The ungendering experiences of Indigenous women domestic workers suggest that both the sororal narrative epitomized by the dominant interpretation of Roma as well as the idea that paid work makes women equal vis‐à‐vis their husbands continue to sanitize and euphemize the highly gendered and racialized and settler colonial labor niche which is domestic work.
This chapter discusses the struggles and achievements of Paraguay’s domestic workers’ trade unions, an atypical actor within the labor movement in terms of gender composition, isolation in the workplace, and lack of access to resources available to traditional labor, such as collective bargaining and strikes. Despite these limitations, paid domestic workers have overcome the legal discrimination they were historically subjected to, obtaining a law that guarantees them the same labor rights as any other worker. By analyzing their organizational and mobilization process, in which the participation of a transnational network of allies was key, I argue that the domestic workers’ atypical character within the Paraguayan workers’ movement might be more of an advantage than a drawback. By focusing on domestic workers, this study has a twofold objective: first, it seeks to shift the focus of analysis, moving it away from traditional trade unions toward atypical actors, highlighting the need to expand our understanding of work, workers, and labor organizations. It also intends to contribute to the study of coalition building as a strategy for workers in precarious work relationships, who have historically been excluded from trade unions.
This article deepens our understanding of agency in the context of (in)securitized migration by engaging with the experiences of ‘undocumented’ women domestic workers in Switzerland. By linking the securitization framework with gaze theories and ontologies of the body, the following article accounts for migrants’ embodied and gendered experiences of (in)security and agency. In this perspective, the same bodies which are subjected to domination become tools of resistance enacted through a politics of in_visibilities. While these women mobilize strategies of invisibilization (camouflage, spatial practices of avoidance) to resist deportation, they simultaneously reappropriate self-representation by visibilizing their embodied presence within Switzerland’s visual field, creating a counter-gaze to their (in)securitization. This is manifest in the three cases of embodied plural performances studied through a methodology that combines interviews and filmmaking. While protesting, dancing and testifying illustrate how practices of bodily display can be used as collective rehumanizing tools, they also show how this mobilized visibility remains constrained by women’s (in)securitized conditions. Their agency becomes apparent in their ability to navigate this fine line, that is, the ways in which they creatively engage with the liminal spaces between the visible and the invisible to visually and politically inscribe their incarnated existence, overall destabilizing the securitized gaze.
Large media platforms are now in the habit of providing facts in their products and representing knowledge to various publics. For example, Google’s Knowledge Graph is a database of facts that Google uses to provide quick answers to publics who use their products, while Wikipedia has a product called Wikidata that similarly stores facts about the world in data formats through which various apps can retrieve the data. Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM use similar fact storing and retrieval techniques in their products. This panel introduces papers that take a political economy perspective on such platformaized versions of fact production and examines the underlying infrastructures, histories, and modeling techniques used in such knowledge representation systems. Knowledge representation, long a central topic in archiving work in library and information sciences, is a key feature of platforms and practiced by internet companies more broadly. Much of this work has historically centered on metadata models that seek to organize and describe information in standardized ways. In the context of expanding this data organizing and labeling work into the wider web, one of the main facilitators was the “Semantic Web” project proposed by Tim-Berners Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Today, many of the same principles, technologies, and standards that were proposed by those early projects in metadata modeling from groups like W3C are found at companies like Google and Facebook, organizations like Wikipedia, government portals, and beyond. These platform metadata models are typically produced by industry professionals (e.g., taxonomists, ontologists, knowledge engineers, etc.) who help structure information for algorithmic processing on platforms and their recommender systems. Such structured information is supposed to add a layer of contextual expressivity to web data that would otherwise be more difficult to parse, though the issue of context control is not unproblematic in relation to statements of facts. In many of these automated systems, metadata models contribute to articulating ready-made facts that then travel through these systems and eventually reach the products that are engaged by everyday web users. This panel connects scholars working in information, media studies, and science and technology studies to discuss these semantic technologies. The first paper presents data gathered from interviews with semantic web practitioners who build or have built metadata models at large internet and platform companies. It presents results from a qualitative study of these platform data management professionals (collectively referred to as “metadata modelers”) and draws from unstructured interviews (n=10) and archival research. The paper describes the image of a metadata ecology along with selected work-related contestations expressed by interview subjects regarding some of the difficulties and intractable problems in metadata modeling work. The paper includes a discussion of the political economy of platform semantics through an examination of critical semantic web literature and ends with some policy concerns. The second paper translates the method of tracing “traveling facts” from science studies to the context of online knowledge about evolving, historic events. The goal is to understand the socio-political impact of the semantic web as it has been implemented by monopolistic digital platforms and how such practices intersect in the context of Wikipedia, where the majority of knowledge graph entities are sourced from. The paper describes how the adoption (and domination) by platform companies of linked data has catalyzed a re-shaping of web content to accord with the question and answer linked data formats, weakening the power of open content licenses to support local knowledge and consolidating the power of algorithmic knowledge systems that favor knowledge monopolies. The third paper discusses building a semantic foundation for machine learning and examines how information infrastructures that convey meaning are intimately tied to colonial labor relations. It traces the practice of building a digital infrastructure that enables machines to learn from human language. The paper describes examples from an ethnographic study of semantic computing and its infrastructuring practices to show how such techniques are materially and discursively performative in their co-emergence with techno-epistemic discourses and politico-economic structures. It examines sociomaterial process in which classifications, standards, metadata, and methods co-emerge with processes of signification that reconstitute and/or shift hegemonic ecologies of knowledge. The fourth paper evaluates and examines the ethics of “free” data (CC-0) in Wikidata by evaluating the sources and usage of data from and within Wikidata. From knowledge graphs to AI training, Wikidata is the semantic web platform that is being used across the Internet to power new platforms. Through a consideration of the ways in which Wikidata scrapes Wikipedia’s “share alike” knowledge through scraping metadata and the significant donations and partnerships from large technology firms (Google in particular), this paper addresses ethical concerns within the largest semantic web platform, how these transformations of knowledge alienate donated volunteer labor, and offers some ways in which these issues might be mitigated.
This essay analyses the intersections of race, gender, and comedy in ¡Cómo está el servicio! (Ozores 1968 ¡Cómo está el servicio! . 1968. Mariano Ozores. Vídeo Mercury Films. [Google Scholar]) to argue that the film brings to light anxieties about purity and womanhood associated with the rapid development of the final years of the Franco dictatorship. By focusing on the film’s brief, yet poignant portrayals of Africans and Afro-descendants and the film’s representations of sex and miscegenation, I argue that ¡Cómo está el servicio! demonstrates the ways that concepts of national purity remain inextricably linked to a politics of the home and the preservation of white womanhood against perceived threats of outside contamination, explicitly articulated through race. Indeed, ¡Cómo está el servicio! visually expresses the ways that appropriate white womanhood linked to domesticity enables women to succeed in an inward-looking Catholic society that simultaneously exalts capitalist principles in order to survive.
Large media platforms are now in the habit of providing facts in their products and
representing knowledge to various publics. For example, Google’s Knowledge Graph is a database of facts that Google uses to provide quick answers to publics who use their products, while Wikipedia has a product called Wikidata that similarly stores facts about the world in data formats through which various apps can retrieve the data. Microsoft, Amazon, and IBM use similar fact storing and retrieval techniques in their products. This panel introduces papers that take a political economy perspective on such platformaized versions of fact production and examines the underlying infrastructures, histories, and modeling techniques used in such knowledge representation systems.
The overall aim of this paper is showing the preference of Spanish society for Latin American immigration, wich is reflected in government decisions. This preference is analysed through statistic data, wich shows the influx of people with foreigner citizenship, and through immigration laws between 2000 and 2001. The current state of immigration policy in Spain is determined by the demand of labour from Latin American. Also, this demand of labour has encouraged a significant change in the immigration pattern, since Spanish nineties immigrants came from North Africa, particularly from Morocco. The main objectives of this article are: on one hand, the explanation for the recent «Latin Americanisation» of Spanish immigration and, on the other hand, a study of the legislative processes wich have generate the increase of the Latin American immigrants flow, at the same time with the inclusion of Spain into the South European migratory pattern.
Paid domestic work is in EU member states mainly performed as undeclared employment in the informal economy. A large share of domestic workers is female migrant workers who very often do not have a proper residence status and suffer discrimination or exploitation due to legal exclusion. This essay focuses on the aspect of illegal entry and stay of migrant domestic workers and discusses its social and political implications within the European context. I start with a brief account on illegal immigration in the EU member states. The following section explores the European Union’s political line to deal with illegal immigration and undeclared work. The final section suggests an outline for a better harmonized approach for coping with illegal migration that regards human right concerns. Making the case of illegal domestic mi-grant workers I argue that a better co-ordination of restrictive and reductive policy instruments would enhance the propensity for a more successful immigration policy that serves both na-tional security interests and human rights concerns.
The concepts of social justice and diversity have attained currency in political discourse and in organisational policy. Since the 1960s, the concept of social justice has been at the forefront of governmental drives to eradicate social inequalities, delivered through a framework of equality of opportunity. Recent years have, however, witnessed a shift away from the ‘traditional’ equal opportunity model of achieving equality towards the adoption of diversity management as a strategy of organisational policy. This shift comes in the wake of the increasing recognition of the diverse nature of employees in the workplace. A cornerstone of diversity management is its stress on the recognition and valuing of individual rather than social-group difference. An emphasis on individual difference may, however, carry profound consequences for the achievement of equality, for it may in fact serve to obscure and exacerbate the structural causes of inequality and, moreover, it may be an inadequate approach to countering the racialised discrimination and disadvantage encountered by black female academics. This article therefore asks: what are the implications of this shift for black and minority ethnic women academics in higher education in the United Kingdom today? Is it possible for higher education institutions and other employers to initiate a diversity policy that not only recognises differences, but at the same time ensures the delivery of policies and practices that challenge inequality?
Introduction Anthropologists have engaged little with the topic of collective action and with the relevant social scientifi c literature. This chapter seeks to respond to recent calls made within the discipline to engage with both. Drawing on fi eldwork carried out among Latin Americans in London, this chapter shows how their mobilization is shaped by a multiplicity of factors and not merely by the political opportunity structure of the country of arrival, as the prevailing approach to migrants' mobilizations seems to contend. In addition to indicating some of the other factors that infl uence migrants' mobilization, the chapter makes some suggestions for rethinking the notion of political opportunity structure in more inclusive, loose, fl exible, and pluralist terms. Last but not least, this chapter offers an account of how Latin American migrants are responding collectively to the difficulties they experience in Britain.
This article attempts to clarify some of the concepts and intellectual projects implied in the emerging critical dialogue between world-systems approach and postcolonial critique. It provides an alternative reading of the "modern world-system," or, as Walter Mignolo has recently proposed, the "modern/colonial world-system." It uses the world-systems approach as a point of departure. Yet, by situating or geopolitically locating knowledge production from the colonial difference of the North-South divide, I attempt to reinterpret important aspects of the capitalist world-system. I am situating my knowledge production not in representation of, but from the subaltern experiences of people in the South. Thus, a world-systems approach provides an important conceptual framework to rethink the modern/ colonial world while an epistemic perspective from the subaltern side of the colonial difference contributes to counter certain limitations of the world-systems approach. The first part is about "coloniality of power" and "symbolic capital" as two crucial concepts that force us to rethink global capitalism. The second part discusses the geopolitics of knowledge and the imaginary of the modern/colonial world-system. The third part is a call for a critical dialogue between two literatures: postcolonial critique and the world-systems approach. Finally, the last section is a brief discussion on the implications of these debates for utopian thinking.
This collectively written article aims to offer a bird's eye view of the Italian debates about precarity in employment and life, as captured in discussions among participants in a focus group held in Milan in 2006. The chief topics that emerged from this discussion include the feminization of labour, feminist practices and methodologies, representation/ participation, and guaranteed income. Here, we give as much space as possible to the diverse voices of participants and their strategies for transformation.
An ever more aggressive anti-migration propaganda war is being waged by the majority of British media, where migration in any form is consistently portrayed on the basis of forming and consolidating a response to a security threat. While tens of thousands of migrant workers are exchanging their sweated labour for meagre wages in the 3-D jobs – dirty, dangerous and degrading – in Britain's food-processing, electronic manufacturing, catering, cleaning and hospitality industries outside any mechanism of labour protection, Britain today is still declining to at least ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers and Their Families in effect since last year. In the post-Morecambe debate on migration and demand for regularizing gangmasters, policing and immigration raids are seen as the quick cure for migrant labour exploitation. The argument sounds as if the only way to get rid of employers' violation of minimum labour rights is to get rid of migrant workers. Britain has forgotten to ask – who are the migrant workers? They are the ones who sweep British roads, clean British supermarkets and serve you food in restaurants in every high street. They are the ones who sew the clothes you wear, put together your microwaves and process the British salads that you have on your dinner table everyday. Migrant workers are people you don't meet everyday but upon whom you depend. To find out about the chain of exploitation in which migrant workers live and the impact of British immigration controls that are fundamental to their lives, I lived undercover among the Chinese workers from whom I learnt a great deal.Feminist Review (2004) 77, 129–136. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400178
Ce texte decrit les changements qui ont affecte le champ de la reproduction a l’ere de la " mondialisation ", afin de l’inserer dans le mecanisme de reproduction du capital : la fameuse " mise au travail de la vie. " Ce qui a des consequences sur les roles assignes aux femmes, et ouvre egalement un espace a de nouvelles hierarchisations entre femmes du Nord et du Sud. L’auteure parle de son propre parcours vers la politique comme pratique du changement, ou la collaboration entre femmes de cultures diverses se revele essentiel, le champ de la consommation et du style de vie devenant de plus en plus celui ou se joue aujourd’hui le conflit avec le capital. Limite, dependance, autonomie, liberte : il s’agit de repenser ces notions appartenant a un modele culturel dont nous apercevons aujourd’hui les effets destructeurs.
The Latin American community in the UK is denied access to services and decent jobs by a combination of restrictive immigration laws, language problems, low wages, prejudice and discrimination, rendering them an impoverished community. This has a disproportionate effect on women, for whom it is a continuous cycle that is difficult to break. This article discusses how marginalisation affects Latin American women migrants, restricting their ability to meet their practical gender needs. The article then examines a community project working with women to overcome discrimination, identifying and achieving both practical gender needs and strategic gender interests.
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.Feminist Review (2004) 77, 6578. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400177
Insufficient attention has been paid in Translation Studies to the challenges particular to translating social scientific texts. Of the few who have taken up the topic, Immanuel Wallerstein has argued that one of the distinguishing characteristics of social scientific texts is that they traffic in concepts. Wallerstein wants the translation of social science to further the possibility of a universal conversation in the social sciences. I argue that a universal conversation in the social sciences is neither possible nor desirable. Instead, this article proposes that translating social science can contribute to conceptual clarification and elaboration. In this way, the translation may complement and further the flowering of the 'original' concept. The essay concludes with an extended example — how 'bewilderment' might be translated into Spanish.
French
Les études de traduction n'ont pas accordé assez d'attention aux défis particuliers posés par la traduction de textes sociologiques. Parmi ceux — peu nombreux — qui ont traité de ce sujet, Immanuel Wallerstein estime qu'une des caractéristiques distinctives des textes relevant de la science sociale est leur trafic de concepts. Wallerstein vise, en stimulant la traduction des sciences sociales, à créer la possibilité d'une conversation universelle au sein de celles-ci. Je soutiens la thèse qu'une telle conversation n'est ni possible ni souhaitable. Au contraire, j'entends, dans cet article, défendre l'idée que la traduction des sciences sociales peut aider à préciser et à élaborer des concepts. De cette façon, la traduction encouragerait l'essor du concept « original ». Je conclus mon essai en fournissant une analyse détaillée de la façon dont on peut traduire 'bewilderment' en espagnol.
Drawing upon data from fifty intensive interviews, this research explores coping styles used by live-in colored domestics working for white employers. Immigration and labor policies enable middle-class Canadian families to employ a captive, vulnerable group of Third World women in an exploitative situation which generates gender, class, and race discrimination. Three types of coping strategies are identified: external—mobilizing community resources and ties with people outside the labor situation, internal—utilizing resources from within work situations, cognitive—altering the definition of the situation. By demonstrating the power resources of the oppressed, this study attempts to overcome the powerlessness bias in the literature on domestics.
Contrary to what might be believed from a naively personalist view of the uniqueness of social persons, it is the uncovering of the structures immanent in the precise form of words constituting an individual interaction that alone allows one to grasp the essentials of what makes up the idiosyncrasy of each of [the subjects in conversation] and all the singular complexity of their actions and reactions. Thus understood, conversational analysis reads each discourse not solely in terms of its speci¢c structure of interaction as a transaction, but also in terms of the invisible structures that organize it. 7