Domestic Service in a Global Perspective: Gender, Migration, and Ethnic Niches (original) (raw)
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Gender, Migration and Domestic Work
2013
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This article foregrounds a labour market for English-speaking and educated female domestic workers and their Western expatriate employers. Many women in this anthropological study had left office jobs and institutional environs connoting dignity to take up employment in Euro-American households performing what is widely perceived as low-status work. Using the narratives of domestic workers, this article scrutinizes motivations for opting for a stigmatized occupation and finds women’s accounts to be multilayered and provocative, thereby challenging established generalizations. In the intimate space of the expatriate household, these female workers diligently perform the tasks of an ‘all-rounder’ that represents a new managerial role in globalizing India. As part of expanding niche labour markets, the article highlights how these roles demand eclectic skill sets, professionalism, certified training, transnational experience and gender-specific expertise. Nonetheless, a key leitmotif i...
This article foregrounds a labour market for English-speaking and educated female domestic workers and their Western expatriate employers. Many women in this anthropological study had left office jobs and institutional environs con-noting dignity to take up employment in Euro-American households performing what is widely perceived as low-status work. Using the narratives of domestic workers, this article scrutinizes motivations for opting for a stigmatized occupation and finds women's accounts to be multilayered and provocative, thereby challenging established generalizations. In the intimate space of the expatriate household, these female workers diligently perform the tasks of an 'all-rounder' that represents a new managerial role in globalizing India. As part of expanding niche labour markets, the article highlights how these roles demand eclectic skill sets, professionalism, certified training, transnational experience and gender-specific expertise. Nonetheless, a key leitmotif is how domestic service with expatriates' remains embedded in power relations and class-race hierarchies. In developing the anthropology of domestic labour, this article illuminates the continuation of persistent inequality and stratification in a locally functioning transnational labour market.
Gender Injustice, Global Injustice, and Migrant Domestic Workers in the United Kingdom
Identity, Belonging and Human Rights: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective, 2019
The current trend of asymmetrical migration of mostly female domestic workers from developing countries to wealthier nations is an emblematic intersection of global and gender injustice. I relate theories of global injustice and Susan Okin’s feminist critique of liberal philosophy to the situation of migrant domestic workers. According to Okin, a problem with liberal philosophers is that they refuse to subject the domestic sphere to assessments of justice. Due to its confinement to the home and the history of invisibility of this kind of work, domestic work has a particularly precarious nature, rendering domestic workers especially vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Using cosmopolitan theories of justice, I show how the interdependence of local economies make it possible to speak of an unjust global economic order, where powerful nations dictate and shape the landscape of global trade and activity. In wealthy, self-identified liberal countries, the entry of affluent women into the traditional labor force created a need for the importation of cheap, migrant domestic labor. The Philippines’ top export is female domestic labor. Many governments that accept migrant domestic workers, including the UK, default on their responsibility to regulate the condition of domestic workers. Migrant domestic workers share an acute form of exploitation in that, unable to find decent jobs in their home countries, they are forced, on pain of destitution, to do invisible, undervalued work in their host countries, where they are prone to more abuse and more exploitation. This phenomenon of migrant domestic workers is a manifestation of the lack of gender progress. I argue that insofar as women who have entered the traditional paid labor force have outsourced their ‘domestic duties’ to women of lesser economic and social standing, claims of gender-advancement are but mere simulacra, or a smokescreen concealing the continuing lack of gender progress within gendered domestic expectations.