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Gendered migrations, social reproduction and the household in Europe

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Abstract

As a framework for empirical studies, global chains of care has become the favored theoretical lens to capture the global transfer of physical and emotional labor from less wealthy regions, whether in the South or the poorer regions of the North to wealthy regions. However, the global chains of care literature has tended to channel research into a narrow set of sectors, skills and sites. In particular, its analysis is framed in terms of flows between households, thus rendering invisible the other sites, external agents and institutions of care interacting with the household as well as the diversity of familial arrangements within the household. Moreover, the household in feminist analysis had moved from being a site of unpaid work to a site of unpaid care. In this article, I suggest we need to unpack what is actually happening in the household in a period of economic, social and political change in which inequalities have increased massively, and state intervention is reshaping how and what activities are undertaken in particular sites and institutions. In order to do this, I suggest in this paper that revisiting the concept of social reproduction would enable us to better appreciate the complexity of the transfer of labor, both in relation to different institutional arrangements and the spatial extension of social reproduction. I firstly briefly review the relationship between social reproduction and its relationship with care in the last 30 years and consider some of the initial North American analyses applying the concept of social reproduction to migrant labor and its increasingly globally extended reproduction. The analysis of specific developments of social reproduction in the household focuses on the European Union.

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Notes

  1. The critique was that this preoccupation concerned white middle class women but that paid domestic labor had been a major sector of employment for racialized and working class women (Nakano Glenn 1992; Duffy 2007).

  2. For her the feminist conception of reproduction encompasses three interrelated meanings—human reproduction, maintaining and sustaining human beings throughout their life cycle, and systemic reproduction which enables a given social system to be re-created and sustained.

  3. They studied four countries (Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, UK in relation to elderly care.

  4. Duffy’s clarification of the meaning of care divides it into two formulations, that of nurturance involving direct contact and reproductive labor extending to non-relational tasks such as cleaning and cooking which may be done in restaurants, canteens or in the home and where the language is not about relations but about maintaining existing life and the reproduction of future generations. The latter highlights the “back-room work of social reproduction” (p. 79) undertaken by low wage workers.

  5. The EU too is now seeking to develop personal and household services in its strategy to create job opportunities (European Commission 2012).

  6. This has been particularly the case in France since 2005 where subsidies for personal services as part of an employment strategy include the whole range of domestic services and not just those directed towards care for specific groups. Whilst certain groups of migrant women from Africa (Maghreb and sub-Saharan) are concentrated in the sector, older women previously employed in other occupations, especially in regions of high unemployment, are also to be found (Devetter and Horn 2011: 9).

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    Eleonore Kofman

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Kofman, E. Gendered migrations, social reproduction and the household in Europe. Dialect Anthropol 38, 79–94 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9330-9

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