Abstract
When Care Work Goes Global: Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work takes after the work of the late Christiane Harzig in exploring the nature of transnational domestic labor and care work. The book is organized into four parts containing chapters that investigate overarching themes. It takes an international approach to surveying care work and domestic labor and includes case studies from Italy, Egypt, Lebanon, and Canada, among others. The book focuses on the central questions of how sending and receiving societies are affected by the relocation of women involved in transnational domestic labor, and how laborers’ experiences in receiving societies are shaped by the racializing and other-ing processes they encounter upon arrival. There are numerous other contributions to be considered, such as how the book grapples with what domestic labor and care work look like for women of particular nationalities. The level of detail this volume achieves is made possible through the deliberate actions of the editors who compiled works that speak to the diverse nature of domestic labor and care work.
The text is particularly novel in its approach to conceptualizing agency and recognizing its conditional manifestation in the lives of laborers. In theorizing the multiple ways that agency can exist within the lives of individuals, the text rejects a singular imaginary of domestic laborers and care workers. In one example, author Maja Korac makes use of Giddens’ concept of structuration to explain the ways in which refugee women in Rome grapple with their agency and means for producing opportunities for themselves that work to ensure their survival.
The global migration systems encountered by women who migrate to perform domestic labor and care work are inherently mitigated by neoliberal policies and practices that rely on such labor in order to exist. The macro-level machineries that have conditioned transnational care work and domestic labor to have taken on the general image of being “intrinsically rewarding” and “unskilled” is interrogated throughout the text as well. Through the usage of case studies from both the Global North and Global South, the text gets to the heart of how systems of global migration become socially reproductive and pose challenges to women who become charged with maintaining their own transnational families, the families they care for, and themselves.
The text’s discussion of the intimate nature of the labor performed in domestic settings is significant in that it interrogates the problematic lack of ability on behalf of the state to protect laborers from exploitation. In chapter six, author Ray Jureidini expands upon this through a case study on domestic laborers in Beirut, Lebanon, and Cairo, Egypt. Because of domestic laborers’ private realm of work, they remain largely invisible from the public sphere of legal protection. The abuses domestic laborers endure at the hands of their employers go largely unchecked because of a number of factors, including the inability to organize owing to work taking place in private households. The potential social and legal ramifications faced by those who attempt to organize are also factors that keep laborers from organizing and reporting abuses.
Maya Shapiro’s chapter, A Politics of Intimacy: Citizenship Rights, Emotion, and the Making of Israeli Children explores how emotion and intimacy become important in the experience of domestic laborers and care workers, specifically in terms of how they are produced in receiving countries. Shapiro also examines the emotional interactions the children of transnational workers have with receiving countries and the families they work for. Emotional expressions such as excessive loyalty and indebtedness become significant markers of intimacy, ultimately shaping power dynamics between both parties.
The political economy of domestic labor and care work is another salient contribution of the book. Trending health and consumption patterns in the Global North have popularized the integration of organic foods and fresh ingredients into one’s daily diet, thereby creating a need for meal preparation and increased at-home cooking. This, in turn, has increased demand for domestic labor within households. Cleaning patterns in Global North households, which have intensified and have become pressing for many families, have also increased this demand. These modern eating and cleaning practices fall on the shoulders of domestic laborers to perform. Neoliberalism, in this example, shapes the ever-changing duties involved with domestic labor to fit market demands and social trends.
This book is appropriate for any course on gender, migration, or labor. It would be best suited for upper-level undergraduate students as well as graduate students. It offers a fresh, nuanced survey of care work and domestic labor that would prove invaluable even to scholars who have studied the field for years.