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The Precarity of Feminisation

On Domestic Work, Heteronormativity and the Coloniality of Labour

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Abstract

Despite women’s increasing participation in the labour market and attempts to transform the traditional gendered division of work, domestic and care work is still perceived as women’s terrain. This work continues to be invisible in terms of the organisation of production or productive value and domestic and care work continues to be unpaid or low paid. Taking domestic and care work as an expression of the feminisation of labour, this article will attempt to complicate this analysis by first exploring a queer critique of feminisation, and second, by situating feminisation within the context of the coloniality of power. Drawing on research conducted in Austria, Germany, Spain and the UK on the organisation of domestic work in private households, the article will conclude with some observations on the interconnectedness of feminisation, heteronormativity and the coloniality of power in the analysis of the expansion of precarity in the EU zone.

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Notes

  1. This research draws on an EU project on the interpersonal relation between domestic workers and their employers in private households conducted in Austria, Germany, Spain and the UK between 2003 and 2004. Twenty-five in-depth interviews and ten focus groups were held in each country with domestic workers from Eastern Europe, West Africa and Latin America, and with middle-aged, professional national White women who employed a domestic worker (Caixeta et al. 2004, Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010, Tate and Vega Solís 2009). The author also conducted further research in Germany, Spain and the UK between 2009 and 2011.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Susie Jacobs, Christian Klesse, Erika Doucette and Shirley Anne Tate for their comments.

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  1. Institute of Sociology, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Karl-Glöckner-Str. 21E, 35394, Gießen, Germany

    Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez

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Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, E. The Precarity of Feminisation. Int J Polit Cult Soc 27, 191–202 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-013-9154-7

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