The Gift of Care: On Filipina Domestic Workers and Transnational Cycles of Care

Abstract

Care has become a key notion in anthropological and feminist circles, not least because it offers a link between debates on the gendered division of labor and on affects, or what in earlier debates were called the authenticity and inauthenticity of feelings (cf. Hochschild 2003a). It has been argued that care and domestic work are naturalized as female and are often taken for granted by both family members and the state, thereby devaluating such work and rendering it socially and economically invisible. Moreover, the notion of care and domestic work as a “labor of love” has been criticized for hiding the structural exploitation, however subtle, typically involved in this type of work. These debates, which arose in the 1970s from studies on the gendered division of labor within Western households and more generally on the reproduction of labor power in the global economy, has recently been renewed in a number of studies on paid care and domestic work typically performed by women from the Global South employed in the Global North (cf. Constable 2009; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010).