Full Description
While the feminisation of transnational migrant labour is now a firmly ingrained feature of the contemporary global economy, the specific experiences and understandings of labour in a range of gendered sectors of global and regional labour markets still require comparative and ethnographic attention. This book adopts a particular focus on migrants employed in sectors of the economy that are typically regarded as marginal or precarious - domestic work and care work in private homes and institutional settings, cleaning work in hospitals, call centre labour, informal trade - with the goal of understanding the aspirations and mobilities of migrants and their families across generations in relation to questions of gender and labour. Bringing together rich, fieldwork-based case studies on the experiences of migrants from the Philippines, Bolivia, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Mauritius, Brazil and India, among others, who live and work in countries within Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America, Gender, Work and Migration goes beyond a unique focus on migration to explore the implications of gendered labour patterns for migrants' empowerment and experiences of social mobility and immobility, their transnational involvement, and wider familial and social relationships.
Contents
List of figures and tables; Series editor's preface; Acknowledgments; Notes on contributors; Introduction (Megha Amrith and Nina Sahraoui); Part I: Migrant workers in feminised sectors: Meanings of work; 1. Emotional labour in the care industry: Workers' best asset or biggest threat? (Nina Sahraoui); 2. 'Here, we don't only receive orders': (Dis)Empowering care labour in Madrid and Paris (Paloma Moré); 3. Cleanliness, affect and social order: On agency and its ambivalences in the context of cleaning work (Käthe von Bose); Part II: Migrant agency, mobilisations and resilience in precarious contexts; 4. Dignity of labour: Activism among Filipina domestic workers in Singapore and Barcelona (Megha Amrith); 5. Migrant women in trade unions: Domestic service activism in France (Colette Le Petitcorps); 6. Gender, mobility and precarity: The experiences of migrant African women in Cape Town, South Africa (Belinda Dodson); Part III: Transforming gender relations; 7. Gender roles and relations within Bolivian migrant networks: Ambivalent transgressions, regressions and new autonomies (María José Oomen Liebers and Sarah Kunz); 8. Two generations of women living in São Paulo's comunidades: Changing education and employment patterns for immigrant mothers and São Paulo-born daughters (Simone Buechler); 9. Precarity, gender capital and structures of (dis)empowerment in the neoliberal service economy (Patrícia Alves de Matos); 10. Gulf migration and changing patterns of gender identities in a South Indian Muslim community (Holly M. Hapke and Devan Ayyankeril); Conclusion (Megha Amrith and Nina Sahraoui); Index
