Professionals and Saints: How Immigrant Careworkers Negotiate Gendered Identities at Work (original) (raw)
Related papers
2006
Russian-speaking homecare workers deploy two divergent discursive practices—professionalism and sainthood—in understanding carework. These two meaning-making systems have consequences for how this work is performed and experienced by workers. Surprisingly, the division is not based on gender. Instead, immigration laws filter Jewish and Orthodox Christian immigrants from the former Soviet Union into two separate sets of resettlement institutions. The characteristics of these separate institutional settings shape the discursive tools available to these two groups leading Jewish refugees to deploy professionalism while Orthodox Christian immigrants deploy sainthood. These discursive practices impact gendered identities allowing workers in some cases to renegotiate hegemonic notions of masculinity and create new models of “feminine” caregiving.
Journal for the Anthropology of North America (formerly North American Dialogue), 2017
Extensive literature on care work or domestic work-childcare, eldercare, and housecleaning-in the United States and internationally has highlighted how the sector's affective aspects, e.g., intimacy, personalism, and fictive kin relationships, extract "surplus emotional labor" (Hochschild 1983) from women workers, who, in turn, often justify their caregiving labor through expressions of sentiment and kin obligation. In this article, I draw on three women's narrative framings of their domestic work jobs to argue that immigrant women in New York City emphasize structural, practical, and contextual elements of their domestic/caregiving labor, challenging constructions of care sector labor as evidence of innate caring aptitudes, womanly duty, or moral service. These characterizations have direct labor policy implications for paid care work-as evidenced in recent reforms. They also provide a theoretical basis for broader redistributive politics linking paid and unpaid caregiving labor.
Un/doing Migration: Understanding the performativity of migrant identities in care work
BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg, 2024
This Rahmenpapier of my habilitation discusses the performativity approaches of Bourdieu and Butler as reflexive research perspectives on the social construction of migrant and refugee identities. Focusing on the performativity of speech acts and emotionalized enactments, I employ empirical data examples about commodified and familial care work that reveals how migration and refugeeness are constituted in micro-level face-to-face interactions. Introducing the concepts of doing, undoing and not doing migration/refugeeness, I show different care performances that reproduce, transform or subvert social identities in the interplay of individual agency with the social regulation by institutional, organizational and discursive structures of the national migration, asylum and integration regimes. Throughout the paper, I argue that the social order of migration/refugeeness is biopolitical and postcolonial: drawing on historical images of orientalism, social positions of internal others are constituted and simultaneously subordinated to the majority society. Regulated by biopolitical means of administration and disciplining, social processes of doing of migration/refugeeness generate affective values in the images of internal and external others, who supposedly depend on the care and control of the hegemonic nation. When ‘migrant/refugee workers’ are used as an effective and economical solution to the increasing labor demand of the nation and when ‘refugee families’ become a commodity on the national market of public and private social services, the social order of migration/refugeeness materializes in productive values that benefit the nation state.
Care and gendered work in reception centers in Finland
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal
Purpose This paper focuses on how gendered processes of working life are (re)constructed and are also challenged discursively in paid and volunteer care and work in reception centers. The purpose of this paper is to show how caring work with asylum seekers can both enhance the traditional gender order and challenge it through enabling men to have opportunities to care. Design/methodology/approach The data were produced through qualitative interviews among paid workers and volunteers in reception centers, and analyzed through a discourse analysis approach. Findings Three discourses of care and work were identified: a discourse on solidarity and care; a discourse on control and order; and a discourse on caring men. The findings show that traditional attitudes toward gender are easily discerned in other cultures, but not as easily recognized in the everyday processes near at hand. Gender order is retained through traditional roles, which also reflects conventional attitudes in a societ...
Role-Identity Dynamics in Care and Household Work: Strategies of Polish Workers in Naples, Italy
Migrant household work is a global phenomenon present across geographical contexts. Employing a household worker, especially a worker coming from another country, is a symbolically complex situation that requires interpretive work and negotiations of role-identities from interactional partners. There has been much debate about how to define the relationship between a domestic and/or care worker and her/his employer. It has been argued that the preferred definition by workers themselves is one that centers on work (Anderson 2000). In contrast, “fictive kinship” appears to be the employers’ almost universal strategy, which is usually portrayed in the literature as an exploitative practice (Romero 1992; Anderson 2000; Parreñas 2001; Constable 2003; Lan 2006; McDowell 2006). In this paper, I offer a conceptual grid that consists of hierarchy/equality and distance/intimacy dimensions to examine complex relationships between domestic workers and employers, elaborated during the case study of Polish migrant domestic workers in Naples in 2004. Within the investigated site some elements of the traditional model of service culture have persisted. Migrant workers who come from a post-communist country, and who have rather egalitarian attitudes, have been confronted with these elements. The result has been a clash of definitions over the household worker’s role. Polish women developed two contrasting ways of experiencing and coping with it. The strategies identified in the workers’ narratives are professionalization and personalization, and they refer respectively to emphasizing the professional and the personal dimensions in relations with the employer. They manifest themselves on the levels of action (as narrated by the workers) and narrative construction. The strategies on the level of action aim to shift the situation in a desired direction; the narrative strategies aim at framing the situation in a desired way within a narrative. The text underlines the diversity of migrant response and tentatively assesses the output of different strategies.
Gendering social work in Russia: towards anti-discriminatory practices
2008
Purpose - This article seeks to uncover the gendered nature of discourses in social services and social work textbooks and their impact on Ithe professional identity of social workers in Russia. Design - it is based on qualitative methodology, referring to interview material, and discourse analysis of the Russian textbooks used in social care education. It addresses three dimensions of gender: labour market policies and women's work/low wages; identity constructions of the social workers; the discourse of gender in teaching material and textbooks. Findings - The research shows that, by setting up inadequate wage policies for social workers, the state has reinforced the societal assumption of cheap women’s labour. In addition, power relations in social work practice reinforce social inequalities. The ideology of a specific female work-capacity is reproduced in social work, as in other forms of care work. Research limitations/implications - The findings highlight that gender differences are represented as biologically materialised substances, while social conditions of their construction are not taken into account. Single mothers are often portrayed as immoral or unfortunate and considered dangerous for their own children and society as a whole. Practical implications - In the education and professional development of social workers, major emphasis needs to be given to anti-discriminatory practice and critical thinking. Originality/value of the paper - The lack of professionalisation of social work is explained in terms of gender inequality in the social order, which is mirrored in the conditions of labour market and therefore especially in ‘female work’.