The current care crisis challenges broad sectors of the population in
caring for themselves, for others, or for being cared for. Meanwhile,
the racialised and gendered capitalist labour regime continues depicting
women as responsible for domestic and care labour worldwide. Globally,
domestic and care work intersect with different inequalities. The
increased migratory flows of racialised and feminised bodies at the
local and international levels highlight the entanglement of complex
processes of oppression and exploitation produced during the migration
course in both the place of origin and destination. The transfer of
domestic and care responsibilities across national borders means their
transfer from one household to another. Global care chains emerge in the
context of globalisation, the feminisation of migration and the
transformation of the welfare state through neoliberal politics and
economics. As (trans)women move, migration is feminised, and
networks of transnational dimensions erupt to maintain daily life.
This paper examines migrant women’s labour and the location of poor
and racialised working women in the context of the contemporary care
crisis. In the first part, I unpack the reconceptualisation of the
housewives as unpaid and reproductive labourers and of servants as
racialised domestic workers. This section includes an analysis of the
concept of labour and working-class agency from a Marxist, Decolonial,
and Postcolonial Feminist perspective. On the one hand, I briefly
reconstruct the feminist critiques of the Marxist political economy and,
on the other, the Decolonial and Postcolonial feminist criticisms of the
Marxist universal model of the capitalist mode of (re)production and its
conceptualisation of marginalised and excluded subjects. The analysis of
key concepts and arguments lays the groundwork for understanding the
debts and innovations of Marx’s political economy, as operated by social
reproduction and contemporary care theory. Drawing on Postcolonial and
Decolonial feminisms, I argue for a broader conception of caring labour
that moves beyond the shortcomings and pitfalls of Angloand Eurocentric
theorisations.
In the second part, I focus on the embodied and affective experiences
of poor, black, brown, and indigenous women to identify concrete
mechanisms and relations of exploitation, oppression, and violence
produced in the migration process to maintain global care chains. I
examine how these relations of exploitation both obstruct the agency and
political organisation of migrant workers and simultaneously enable
practices and strategies for developing a critical consciousness and
political organisation beyond union-based alliances, not without the
permanent risk of co-optation by NGOs and international agencies. My
analysis draws on case studies (documentary research) of Mexican,
Indian, and Filipina migrant women. I propose a simultaneous theoretical
and case analysis approach to illuminate the limits and potentialities
of concepts and practices.
In the last section, I highlight the inherent ambivalences of global
care chains as a process of both neocolonial feminisation of migration
and reproduction of neoliberal capitalism and as a shared context of
struggle and resistance grounded in embodied and affective experiences.
On the one hand, the global care labour market is built on social
hierarchies, political ideologies, cultural values, and mechanisms of
economic exploitation, producing new modes of colonisation. On the other
hand, the care networks and alliances that emerge in the course of the
migration process advance transnational emancipatory and feminist
solidarity projects. My aim is to show how Global South
women’s concrete experiences and conceptualisations of exploitation and
domination have enriched the dominant Western feminist theory of women’s
struggles for autonomy and liberation.
Women’s Global Exploitation and Domination: Gendered and
Racialised Labour
Marxist feminist theory and women’s struggles have gone a long way to
reconceptualise the figure of housewives as unpaid and reproductive
labourers and the figure of servants as racialised domestic workers. The
shift in our understanding of domestic and care work has not only
rendered meaningful the exploitation, oppression, and violence suffered
by (trans)women; it has also substantiated new conceptual tools and
theoretical frameworks to acknowledge domestic and care workers as
political and historical agents. Despite these positive developments,
the history of women and (trans)feminist movements, their alliances and
disagreements with the workers’ and union movements, as well as the
questions connected to the relevance of gender relations for the
critique of the political economy, remain contested and are an ongoing
debate. The following section reviews classical Marxist-feminist theory
in light of contemporary Decolonial and Postcolonial theories from the
Global South.
The debate on reproductive labour in the Global North, especially in
the Anglo-American and European contexts, focused initially on cis,
white, and unpaid work of heterosexual women in the household. In the
1970s, Western feminists argued that Marx and Engels and the
subsequent Marxist tradition devalued and essentialised reproductive
labour as feminised labour in relation to factory work, which was
naturalised as male, thereby leaving unchallenged the binary and
gendered division of labour. In search for a theory
capable of explaining the sources of female oppression from a class and
gender perspective, Marxist and Socialist feminists discovered a rich
conceptual framework for understanding women’s labour and its role in
producing value in Marx’s political and economic theory. One of the main
contributions of feminist Marxism was to critically address some
conceptual binaries within the Marxist framework. A highly relevant
distinction made by Marx between the servants and the working classes
shows that this differentiation rests on an abstract notion of labour
power as a potential capacity to labour that does not realise its value
until it becomes objectified into a commodity. Based on this definition,
a worker’s labour produces a commodity whose value generates profit when
circulated within a market (exchange value); in contrast, a servant’s
labour creates a personal service for their employer that is consumed
and, consequently, whose value entirely dissolves by that single
exchange (use value). Servants’ labour does not produce any surplus
value even if their activities and services share characteristics
similar to those of the industrial proletariat, i.e., free labour rather
than slavery, paid employment instead of being paid in kind. However,
for Marx, servants living and working in modern capitalist societies
continue to embody pre-capitalist social relations (Schwartz, 2022).
This depiction of servants as “unproductive” workers echoed similar
arguments on the unproductiveness of reproductive labour. Whether
servants’ and women’s labour produce surplus value or only use value and
thus does not directly contribute to profit divides feminists still
today (Arruzza, 2022, 2013; Gimenez, 2000).
Likewise, Marxist feminists have shown that Marx’s analytical
distinction between productive and unproductive labour is politically
charged. Marx’s omission of a general servant class or domestic servant
labour is problematic, considering that servants were employed to do
hard manual domestic labour in middle-class households and not luxury
items of the wealthy bourgeoisie, as he claims (Marx, 1993, p. 465,
1990, p. 574, in Schwartz 2022). The result was the omission of a
general (domestic) servant class as part of the working class, which, to
some extent, rendered them parasites of the bourgeois class or even a
counter-revolutionary force. Therefore, they were not regarded as agents
of history (see Marx, 1990, pp. 1044-1045, in Schwartz, 2022). This
exclusion has contributed to the invisibilisation not only of
(trans)women and feminised bodies but also of the workforce of colonised
and subaltern subjects. In this manner, household servitude and paid
domestic labour were excluded from productive labour and the
proletariat. The conflation between domestic servants and unwaged
housewives within the private sphere in opposition to men’s productive
and waged labour outside the household resulted in the denial of women
and colonised subject agency. In the context of industrialisation and
the growth of the welfare state in Europe in the decades following the
Second World War, the decline of domestic and servant labour relegated
them to a pre-capitalist form of labour, deemed backward and meant to
disappear. A central strategy of Marxist feminists critically addresses
the reproduction of labour power to defy the clear-cut distinction
between waged and unwaged labour, between spaces of the production of
value and spaces for the reproduction of labour power, questioning the
Marxist notion of labour and value (Bhattacharya, 2015).
For these feminists, analyses of capitalism that focus exclusively on
value production and waged labour are one-sided. It is misleading to
understand labour and labour power exclusively as “assets” for making a
profit rather than as conditions for (re)producing life. For Marxist
feminists, labour is a human activity that creates life and workers for
capital. A central thesis of this debate argues that labour power is a
socially and hierarchically organised, embodied capacity. This led to a
growing number of scholars addressing gender hierarchies as providing
the foundation of class relations. (Arruzza, 2022, 2013; Gimenez, 2000).
These analyses have shown to what extent the production of value at the
factory is substantiated by the production of labour power in the
household. This first generation of Marxist feminists accurately showed
that capitalism as a mode of production relies on the regulation and
control of women to perform unwaged, poorly paid, and/ or serviceable
reproductive labour. Capitalism presupposes and perpetuates the
subordination and domination of women.
The almost exclusive attention given to the binary gender hierarchy
that connects the production of life and value in the specific direction
of the reproduction of labour power in the household turned into a new,
dualistic explanation that accounts only for heteronormative
gender-class relations. This approach presupposes that the reproduction
of labour-power and the worker’s life under capitalism appears
universally within the bourgeois heterosexual family and is performed
predominantly by cis women. Recent generations of Marxist feminists,
like Social Reproduction (SR), Black, Decolonial, and Postcolonial
Feminisms, as well as Transgender Marxism, broadened this focus to
address how the social reproduction of labour power provides the
foundation of accumulation processes in relation to other ways of social
oppression. This approach led to a more complex theory of capitalist
social reproduction that enlightens the intersection of race, ethnicity,
heterosexism, sexuality, ableism, colonialism, and religion, among other
forms of oppression (Bhattacharya et al., 2022; Gleeson and
O’Rourke, 2021). By incorporating women’s, queer, trans, indigenous,
black, and people of colour perspectives and embodied experiences,
feminists worldwide revolutionised Marxism from within and continue to
do so.
The diversity of the analyses and strategies of Marxist feminists to
address the diagnosed problems of social reproduction vary across space
and time. The (often) unacknowledged situatedness of the issues
identified explains the shortcomings in diagnosing the problems and
proposing solutions for all women. Analyses from the Global
North tend to emphasise the unwaged housewife’s labour, reflecting the
nature of the labour market in the historical moment and geographical
location of the XIX and XX—centuries in Europe, the United Kingdom and
the United States. In the Global South, domestic servants and unwaged
housewives did not decline like in Europe. Contrarily, independence and
decolonisation struggles did not end colonial servant and slave
relations. Although in most countries, slavery was formally prohibited,
new kinds of servitude and domesticity were renewed by postcolonial
elites who continued to enforce new kinds of unwaged service and coerced
exploitation (Van Nederveen Meerkerk et al., 2015).
The shift in attention of the Marxist feminist scholarship from the
Central Western, white, male factory worker to the housewife was
deepened by the introduction of the concept of the subaltern subject,
based on Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of the peasants. In the 25th prison
notebook, “On the Margins of History. History of Subaltern Groups”,
Gramsci (2011) addresses non-hegemonic collectives. The term refers to
those subjects who had yet to be integrated into the industrial,
capitalist system. For him, subalternity is produced by economic
oppression as well as by social, political, and cultural subordination.
Building on this notion, Postcolonial theory departs from Gramsci’s
concept to broaden the scope of analysis by extending the conceptual
framework beyond a focus on rural peasants and farmers to include all
marginalised and excluded groups, whether based on race, class, gender,
sexual orientation, ethnicity, disability or religion. The concept of
the subaltern addresses Marx’s omission of servant labour and refers to
those sections of society that the universal logic of the capital failed
to assimilate. Subaltern Studies scholars,
have shown that the dissolution of the peasant class during the rise of
capitalism in Europe and North America was contrary to their ongoing
reproduction under capitalism in the Global South and took another
trajectory in the non-Western world (Dhawan, 2018).
Feminist approaches from the Global South, along with anti-racist,
anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial positions, have criticised and
extended Marx’s political economy and thickened the notion of
emancipation. Postcolonial and Decolonial feminist scholars such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
Séverine Durin, and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, address the disparate
operations of modernity, capitalism, and patriarchy by globally tracing
the divergent emergence of cultural, political, and economic practices
and institutions. By highlighting the distinctiveness of the
postcolonial world, scholars from the Global South challenged the claim
that humans share common needs and interests independently of situated
and concrete differences to understand better their specific forms of
oppression, exploitation, and violence (Mohanty, 2003a, 2003b). The
denial of common universal interests shared by all human beings
irrespective of race, gender, sexuality, religion, or other differences
has led them to affirm that capitalism, modernity, and patriarchy differ
in the postcolonial world, i.e., disparate configurations of family,
community, society, market, and state (Dhawan, 2018). Hence, political
and collective action does not derive from any essential universal human
nature and a shared political consciousness; somewhat, it is
substantiated by particular needs, interests, desires, and aspirations
historically, culturally, and economically constituted (Spivak,
2014).
Against this background, Postcolonial and Decolonial feminisms
embrace the challenge of applying Marx’s categories to analyse specific
and contextualised embodied experiences of women and subaltern subjects,
illuminating the contexts and temporalities in which poor, black, brown,
rural, trans, queer and indigenous women continue to be employed in
domestic and servant’s labour. This intersectional and
situated focus on diverse women’s local and daily life experiences
guided many feminist theories to a less considered feature of labour,
the embodied and affective dimensions of social reproduction: care. In
its origins, the concept of care can also be traced to the “ethics of
care”, a cluster of theories that stress the importance of responding to
the individual in opposition to ethical theories that emphasise
generalisable standards and impartiality, i.e., deontologist and
consequentialist. In her book In a Different Voice (1982),
Carol Gilligan holds that the difference between care-based and
justice-based ethical models is due to gender differences, questioning
ethical objectivity as a masculine perspective on morality. Although
care ethics is not synonymous with feminist ethics, a lot has been
written about care ethics as a feminine and feminist ethics, such as
motherhood and kinship relations, resembling the ideal of white
middle-class women developed in the nineteenth century (Tronto, 1990).
However, for the purpose of this analysis and based on the case studies
mentioned above, this approach to care is insufficient, not only because
of its structural risk of essentialism, i.e., failing to explore how
women differ from one another, and thereby offering a uniform and
homogenising picture of moral development that reinforces sexist
stereotypes (Tronto, 1994); but primarily because of its restricted
moral approach to the individualistic, private and intimate spheres of
life (whether it is framed according to virtuous motives or
communicative skills), losing sight of the structural and social
dimension of care, i.e., political and economic dimensions. In this
sense, caring as practice and a relation entail power and conflict and
raise practical questions about justice, equality and freedom.
According to a political and economic approach, care is relational
(the interaction between care and cared for), an embodied experience
(needs, capabilities, emotions, sensations and functions), and
fundamental in the subjectivation processes of individuals and groups.
It refers to all the activities that provide physical, psychological,
and emotional wellbeing as a foundation for making and maintaining life.
The diverse research on care moves away from the approach that conceives
the (re)production of life as a sole mechanism for reproducing the next
generation of workers. In that manner, care goes beyond comprehending
reproductive and care practices solely as commodified services or
(un)waged labour (Esteban, 2017; Tronto, 2013). In this manner,
reproductive labour and care are both fundamental conditions for
(re)producing life and social relations articulated around gender,
kinship, and age (Esteban, 2017). Against the framework of Postcolonial
and Decolonial feminist theories, care is not a value, disposition, or
virtue; instead, it is a practice, a kind of labour, and a particular
social relationship embedded in power relations determined by material
conditions. The focus on care’s normative dimension, as an ideal that
guides normative judgement and action, is not central to these
frameworks but rather a form of affective and embodied work or what I
call caring labour, i.e., a social practice determined by
ascribed social values. Care, therefore, implies cultural variation and
extends beyond family and domestic spheres to social institutions and
ties characterised by political and economic relations.
Moreover, grounded on a critique of neoliberal individualism and the
capitalist market, the concept of care broadens the notion of life
relations beyond human relations. It distinguishes between interpersonal
reciprocity, social interdependence, and ecological dependence. In this
sense, it includes everything we do to maintain, contain, and repair our
world (our bodies, ourselves, and our environment) to live in it as well
as possible (Fischer and Trono, 1990). This approach further develops
the Marxist framework centred around relationships based on needs and
relations of domination to connect them to its embodied dimension of
affects, desires, and aspirations (Esteban, 2017; Svampa, 2015; Herrero,
2017). In this manner, it extends the scope of analysis beyond the
forced institution of heteronormative motherhood and the bourgeois
family to its institutionalisation and externalisation in the state and
on private and global markets. Therefore, care is no longer only the
work performed in the household realm (Tronto, 2013). The
commodification of care, however, has not resulted in the socialisation
that early and contemporary Marxist feminists have been struggling for.
Hence, to avoid an essentialist and a mechanistic view of social
reproduction and care, contemporary theories should be grounded in the
experiences of actual working subjects. In what follows, I focus on one
particular subject: the migrant worker. I argue that given the current
challenges posed by the feminisation of migration and the increasing
global care chains, nothing short of the reconceptualisation of a
Decoand Postcolonial Marxist feminist political economy can address the
problems that arise from the current care crisis and the pitfalls of
Western theories of social reproduction and care.
The Neocolonial Feminisation of Migration and Working
Women’s Resistance
The current global care crisis highlights the increasing difficulties
that large segments of the population face when caring for themselves
and others or when being cared for (Pérez Orozco and López Gil, 2011;
Ezquerra, 2011). The crisis of care consists of the systematic
undermining of social reproduction by capitalism, comprehended as an
economic and social order (Fraser and Jaeggi, 2018). This is part of a
general crisis encompassing economic, ecological, social, and political
features that intersect with and exacerbate one another. The current
tensions are not accidental but have deep systemic roots in our
socio-political and economic structure. Every kind of capitalist society
harbours a contradiction: on the one hand, social reproduction is a
condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the
other hand, the orientation of capitalism towards unlimited accumulation
tends to destabilise the processes of social reproduction it relies on
(Fraser, 2016). This crisis tendency undermines the same processes of
the social reproduction of natural and human life. The processual
character of the care crisis reveals that the dominant Western model
from the Global North is no longer viable and that the upcoming model is
being determined at the margins by peripheral countries, mainly in the
Global South (Pérez Orozco & López Gil, 2011).
Since the care crisis mainly affects Western countries (the US,
Canada, and Central Europe), domestic and care work has also globalised,
producing global care chains. These networks of transnational dimensions
are formed to maintain daily life (Pérez Orozco, 2009). Chains represent
a series of links (composed mainly of (trans) women or feminised bodies)
through which care is transferred from one household to another. In its
simplest version, a chain could consist of a German family that hires a
Mexican woman to care for a family member who needs constant assistance.
The hired woman, who has emigrated to provide an income for her family,
leaves her sister-in-law in her country of origin to care for her
children. These transnational relations consist of at least three kinds
of women: middleor upper-class women in destination countries, migrant
domestic and care workers, and women who are too poor, old, or sick to
migrate (Salazar Parreñas, 2000). Chains encompass three essential
links: the migrant household, the employer household, and the household
of origin (Durin, 2017, p. 241). The double transfer consists of
starting paid care work in the place of destination and delegating care
work to the place of origin while continuing to provide remote care. The
extension and assembly of the chains depend on the intrafamilial
distribution of care, the existence or absence of public services, the
influence of the business and the private sector, the regulation of paid
domestic service, and migration policies, among others. Care chains
combine multiple modalities of reproductive labour and care tasks in
diverse spaces, including the market, the household, and public or
private non-profit institutions (such as schools, nursing homes, care
facilities for disabled people, hospitals, hospices, funeral homes,
etc.) (Pérez Orozco, 2009).
The allocation from the periphery to the centre, from the North to
the South, contributes to sustaining the economic growth of
post-industrialized countries (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007). For peripheral
countries, this phenomenon implies the outsourcing and/or
commodification of domestic and care tasks that women used to perform
for free, or that cannot be performed anymore due to the current
precariousness of wages in the destination countries (Fraser, 2016;
Pérez Orozco, 2009). In countries at the centre, women have gained
significant access to the market, and the neoliberalisation of states
has transferred the responsibility of reproductive and care work to
individuals and the private market. All this happens while inequalities
between the North and the South widen, the precarisation of waged labour
increases, and supranational actors increasingly organise and regulate
domestic and care work (World Bank, International Labor Organisation,
United Nations, etc.). Global migration and transnational relations are
crucial to the contemporary reproductive and care labour regime. Women’s
movements across borders and their incorporation into global markets to
perform domestic and care work, as well as in arranged marriage and
trafficking for the sex industry, have led to the feminisation of
migration. Women’s migration from the South to meet the needs of the
North, or from poorer countries to wealthier countries, for instance,
from Eastern to Central Europe, means that women are now increasingly
more likely to migrate to take up jobs rather than join male family
members as dependents. The demand and supply for migrant women’s labour
are defined by hierarchical social structures enforced by the capitalist
and neoliberal labour market.
Global care chains confirm not only the persistence of gendered
definitions of womanhood, defining (un) waged labour, but also expose
the limits of the home/family and waged work framework to address global
dynamics and the contemporary labour market. Moreover, it shows that
these boundaries have always been fluid for poor and racialised women.
Feminist frameworks and struggles formulated within the discourse on
labour rights (the right to pension, etc.) and the liberal
redistributive economic framework (the demand for equal pay, etc.) face
new challenges to address the versatility and specificity of capitalist
and neoliberal exploitation in connection with violent racial, imperial
and gendered oppression. Domestic and care labour regimes organised by
class are structurally linked to racial, gender and colonial regimes
that transfer these tasks to women whose identities have been previously
defined and assigned in their countries of origin and countries of
destination (Salazar Parreñas, 2000).
The examined research on the feminisation of migration and the
globalisation of domestic and care labour reveals the processes of
normative heterosexuality, declassification, infantilisation, and
racialisation they are made subject to, justifying their exploitation
and violent treatment (Durin, 2017; Bautista, 2010). Traditional and
binary notions of femininity, masculinity, sexual orientation,
domesticity, and family continue to play an essential role in forming
women’s identity by segregating spaces, imposing places of work, and
relying on kinship relationships that presume not only a sexual division
of labour but a definition of womanhood as natural caregivers whose
reproductive capacity demands their heterosexuality. Women are always
defined by their relation to men in marital and familial ties as
mothers, housewives, and sisters. Their life cycle determines their
labour trajectory and migratory processes, i.e., their mobility is
circumscribed to specific motivations defined by gender roles, stages of
reproductive ability, types of skills connected to management and
attention, as well as ways of living demarcated by their kinship
relationships (Durin, 2014a). Based on these oppressive and violent
mechanisms and relations, women’s labour is defined as temporary,
complementary, and unqualified.
The reviewed case studies of Mexican, Indian, and Filipina migrant
women working in the Global North also show that gendered notions of
domestic and care work intersect with interpersonal and group dynamics
that reproduce colonial relations of subordination, extreme
exploitation, abuse, and sexualised violence. Domestic work is the most
servile form of reproductive and care work, which in most cases
constitutes an ethnicised and racialised labour niche due to the rural,
peasant, and indigenous origins of most of the migrant workers (Durin,
2020; Mohanty, 2003a). The heteronormative and gendered definition of
domesticity and care shows not only the masculinisation of the notion of
labour and the invisibilisation of women’s work in the household, the
factory, the sweatshop, the family business, the plantation, etc., but
neglects and denies women’s subjectivity by defining them as victims of
tradition, religion, or culture, denying them any form of agency
(Abu-Lughod, 2002; Mohanty, 2003b).
In destination countries, for instance, feminised and migrant labour
is conceived as unskilled and easy, like following a recipe and grounded
on the idea that migrant women possess specific personality traits such
as tolerance, patience, ignorance, or immaturity, portraying them as
children who must be educated or civilised. These characteristics are
assumed and constantly reproduced as necessary conditions for tedious
and repetitive work that only a particular kind of person can perform.
The employer household considers migrant women docile, lenient, and
satisfied with substandard wages (Mohanty, 2003a). In addition, the
tasks performed are identified by employers as a kind of work that only
women from less developed regions and poorer classes can do, whether
this is the case or not. The instances of Mexican and Philippine women
show how migrant women are not only infantilised but also
underdeveloped, i.e., this is also the case of southern, middle-class,
and educated women who migrate to perform care labour as au
pairs and who are perceived and treated as being poor and
uneducated (Durin, 2014b). These examples show to what extent the
gendered and racialised domestic and care regime is part of a
contemporary and global recolonisation process through labour
and migration (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007; Mohanty, 2003a). Current
international relations continue to be profoundly shaped by the power
relations inaugurated in the conquest, established under modern
colonialism, to the extent that despite the formal independence of
colonised countries, the contemporary global order can be described as a
colonial, uninterrupted order that has taken on a new form (Mohanty,
2003b;
Quijano, 2000). This neocolonial system of political domination,
economic exploitation, and social violence is, in a fundamental way,
sustained by the feminisation of migration.
Decolonial theory’s focus on the critique of the ongoing structures
of coloniality that sustain Western dominance has set the ground for a
richer analysis of how post or new forms of colonial structures of
exploitation and domination have continued to shape the world in the
Global South. Latin American scholars have developed a rich
framework to understand the enduring patterns of power, control,
violence and domination, grounding modernity and coloniality’s
entanglement. This broader structure persists in global power relations,
knowledge systems, and identities, i.e., as coloniality of power,
knowledge, being and gender (Maldonado-Torres, 2016). The identification
of the “darker side” of modernity, i.e. coloniality, also means a call
for challenging and dismantling its structures and relations (Mignolo,
2011). Here highlights De(s)colonial Feminisms from Latin America, whose
particular attention to the forms of oppression experienced by
indigenous, afro-descendant and other marginalised women in
Abya Yala led them to develop a more
multifaceted approach that accounts simultaneously for race, class, and
gender oppression and advocates for epistemic decolonisation, autonomy,
and the defence of the body/territory and community as a central feature
of their struggles. De(s)colonial feminism’s emphasis on the importance
of collective resistance and community-based struggles promotes
community wellbeing, solidarity and collective action, in contrast to
certain strands of Western feminism, such as the early approaches to
care ethics framed within the individual and private sphere.
In this context of neocolonial global relations and despite the
unjust contemporary care regime, global care chains encompass an
ambivalent reconfiguration process. The same processes grounding
exploitative and oppressive relations provide the basis for collective
and organised action grounded in everyday needs, interests, desires, and
aspirations of the migrant worker, challenging the traditional union
method based on the class interests of the male worker as an
insufficient strategy for feminist and transnational solidarity
networks. The shared experiences and working conditions across
geographical and cultural divisions have enabled domestic and care
workers in most Western countries to achieve different labour rights,
i.e., social security, minimum wage, overtime pay, rest breaks, and
safer working conditions. However, despite the high importance of these
reforms, they seem insufficient for the kind of change that feminists
are struggling for. Nonetheless, this only holds if we understand these
achievements as mere legal and normative transformations. The conceptual
shift in the recognition and regulation of housewives’ and servants’
unpaid and forced labour to domestic and care work, and their practical
strategies of organising and mobilisation, have led to a shift in
consciousness and politicisation, allowing them to see themselves as
racialised workers and women, rather than as entrepreneurs who control
their activities in the informal market or as “natural” carers.
Moreover, the collectivisation of their particular interests and affects
into various kinds of networks, alliances, and cooperatives has enabled
the layout of emancipatory strategies and alternative practices
necessary to envision and enact transnational feminist solidarity
(Mohanty, 2003a).
The case of women who migrate out of economic necessity or due to
contexts of extreme violence to perform domestic or care work sets in
motion a series of transformative processes and dynamics. Global care
chains are traversed by subversive relations (among humans and nature) and practices promoting historical
and political agency (Goldsmith, 2001). Concrete cases and experiences
of indigenous, rural, and subaltern Mexican, Indian and Filipina women
reveal the fundamental role of collectively addressing shared problems
and needs to formulate joint demands and concretising expectations
against sexual harassment, for better working conditions, for redefining
their tasks and services or substantiating their aspirations for a
decent and dignified life, for example (Bautista, 2010; Durin 2020,
2017, 2014; Goldsmith 2000, 2001, 2013, 2018; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2007;
Mohanty 1988, 2003; Salazar Parreñas 2000, 2001; Pérez Orozco 2009,
2011). The organisation of women workers into unions has been only one
of the various ways to address and engage with their needs, desires,
affects, and aspirations to translate them into concrete agendas for
social change. The capacity to aspire, understood as the subject’s
competence to navigate by the coordinates (norms) of the (social) map,
qualifies subjects to explore trajectories for transformative action
(Appadurai, 2004, 2007). For racialised migrant women workers,
formalising their shared interests into specific demands to the state or
international organisations allows them to identify the contradictions
they face as (trans)women, workers and racialised subjects, as well as
the challenges of achieving local solutions or addressing urgent
problems. Thus, although in their daily work shifts, they experience an
exploitative, discriminatory, forced, precarious, and violent domestic
and care regime, simultaneously, this scenario sets the conditions for
life-changing and joint action that goes beyond the local and
nation-state levels.
The feminisation of migration, whether within national or
international borders, is connected to processes of subjectification
mobilised by affects and embodied experiences. The reviewed empirical
research on the work-life course of migrant women from the Global South
shows that migration is not a mere survival strategy grounded in their
fears or insecurities about the future but reveals a set of desires and
aspirations such as social mobility, the pursuit of equal treatment, and
respect based on the quality and merit of their work or the realisation
of a good life and of dignified labour (Durin, 2014a, 2020; Mohanty,
2003a). By engaging with their aspirations, they have reversed their
imposed condition of invisibility, bursting into and capturing the
public space. By addressing their desires, their voices are rendered
audible, challenging their enforced condition of silenced victims and
infantilised subjects. By challenging the sexual division of labour, the
intrinsic inequalities of the global labour regime, and the
intersectional forms of oppression enforced in migration, they defy the
gendered and racialised neocolonial labour and migration regime,
affirming themselves as historical and political agents. By the
collectivisation of desires and aspirations, domestic and care workers
formulate local, regional, and transnational solidarity networks, acting
as activists across borders (Goldsmith, 2013, 2018; Durin, 2020). This
is the case of the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of
Domestic Workers (Conlactraho for its acronym in Spanish) (1988), the world’s first regional
organisation of domestic workers, which represents an extraordinary
example of how political and legal literacy is simultaneously a
condition and an effect of their struggles and challenges as well as
their engagement and strategies towards broader social change. Another
outstanding case in Europe is the transborder associations
Territorio Doméstico and Las Kellys, whose initial
struggles for rights drove them to dispute decision-making processes
within the state, reclaiming a seat in formulating and reforming public
policies.
The Ambivalences of the Global Care Chains: Challenges and
Prospects
The politicisation and organisation of working-class women in the
context of the neocolonial feminisation of migration and reconfiguration
of the Western care regime face numerous challenges. A central concern
of Decolonial and Postcolonial feminists underscores the tension between
the democratic grammar, the rule of law, and the socio-political
location of migrant women to ensure their inclusion as citizens. To
avoid the reproduction of subalternity, inclusion must go beyond their
formal conversion into political and legal bearers of rights and duties,
and emancipation must be formulated on the grounds and beyond the
framework of citizenship to include economic autonomy and gender and
racial justice. Individual rights are insufficient to transform
structural and systematic mechanisms and relations that threaten social
and natural reproduction and (non)human life unless they are based on
material changes (redistribution of wealth, etc.). Interventions by
migrant women, such as the assessed case studies of Mexican, Indian and
Filipina women, demonstrate that marginalised and excluded subjects
engage with their future based on desires and aspirations. Grassroots
organisations and collectives of migrant women, such as the Latin
American and Caribbean Confederation of Domestic Workers or
Territorio Doméstico and Las Kellys, aim to alter the
terms of social and political recognition and power relations and
achieve economic independence. In this sense, the crucial role of
situated and embodied experiences proves fundamental for enabling
strategic alliances beyond individual self-interest, the fragile bond of
the shared need, and the mere instrumentalisation of the ally. Hence,
collective and emancipatory strategies emerge to materialise political
solidarity networks transnationally and transborder.
In combination with civil society, transnational cooperation and
cross-border networks have undoubtedly facilitated women’s participation
in local and global politics, i.e., the International Domestic Workers
Federation (IDWF) (2006, 2009, 2012), the first membership-based global
organisation of household and domestic workers. The IDWF played a
fundamental role in advocacy and research to launch the International
Labour Organization C189 Domestic Workers Convention (2011). Still, the
risk of being co-opted by global capitalism or elite interests is
permanent, i.e., the feminist analysis of the contemporary labour
standards regime, exemplified by the International Labour Organization’s
(ILO) Core Labour Standards (CLS), exposes how the CLS was designed to
work within a broadly neoliberal model of development: a model dependent
on the increased vulnerability and flexibilisation of employment,
reinforcing gender and racial inequality. However, the genderand
race-blind, neoliberal-compatible approach to economic rights
articulated by the CLS in the language of human rights imposes a moral
and normative approach that cannot be adequately realised within the
current unequal structures of global social hierarchies (Elias, 2007;
Elias and Hayley, 2009). Universalist values or principles, or merely
normative solidarity projects, risk falling into complicity with the
global structures of domination they pretend to resist. Incorporating
local struggles into one universal movement risks reinforcing
the neoliberal or neocolonialist agendas by presupposing a general or
formal notion of womanhood, sisterhood, development, progress, or
civilisation.
The problem of universal solutions for the emancipation of
(trans)women everywhere is that they render invisible the differences by
way of which hierarchies and inequalities are enforced. Hence, it is
crucial to continue to stress the embodied experiences of migrant women,
racialised and feminised subjects, which are meant to correct biases,
ignorance, and arrogance and to guide emancipatory projects built on
local histories and concrete cases of resistance and struggle from
below. This means transforming our conception of domestic or care
workers as objects of charity (of the state, NGOs or international
organisations) into historical and political agents whose organisation
and politicisation move them not only out of need but also into
solidary alliances and emancipatory projects based on desires and
aspirations for radical social and economic change. Political solidarity
should avoid establishing unequal relationships between those who give
justice, goods, and rights and those who receive them. It is a kind of
collectivism among (trans)women workers across gender, class, race, and
national boundaries, grounded on shared material needs, interests, and
embodied desires and aspirations. To achieve the radical social change
(trans)feminism aims at, domestic and care workers must remain the
protagonists of their struggles. Their subordinating, co-optation, or
coercive alignment to unions, parties, NGOs, academics, or hegemonic
feminist agendas can only once again mean a failure for feminism both in
the Global North and South.
As it has been shown, a theory capable of challenging the
contemporary neocolonial and neoliberal capitalist system that shapes
the current social organisation of domestic and care labour enforced by
the feminisation of migration must address the heteronormative and
racialised notion of labour and deepen the entanglement between
political economy and domination and oppression theories. Focusing on
racialised migrant women workers through Decolonial and Postcolonial
feminist theories allows for a better understanding and more
sophisticated theorising to address the problems arising from current
social reproduction and care accounts to explain the contemporary care
crisis. The embodied and affective experiences of domestic and care
workers show that different forms of exclusion, discrimination, abuse,
and violence, in addition to exploitation, maintain local and global
processes of capitalist recolonisation through migration. Global care
chains display the current crisis of the global society centred on
labour while simultaneously setting in motion alternative forms
of relations of interdependence, reciprocity, ecodependence, and
solidarity, anticipating what might be the transition from a society
structured around work to a form of labour organised around situated
collective needs, aspirations, desires, and interests to foster care for
all forms of life. Transnational and transborder solidarity deployed in
global care chains is an exceptional example of solidarity from below,
as they avoid establishing unequal relationships between those who give
justice, goods, and rights and those who receive them.
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