Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm
In this paper, I briefly explore the increasingly heteronormative
framing of gendered global migration in recent research works in the
area.[1]
The study of the so-called "feminization" of global migration
is best exemplified in the chain of care migration paradigm. This
paradigm, established by social scientists, focuses on the movement of
Third World female migrants to the First World as domestic workers to
take care of children and the elderly. "Chain of care" pivots around a
disturbing process of gendering that is based on the deployment of
normative conceptions of care, love, and other emotions.
But before I launch into my argument, I want to briefly acknowledge
the location of gender in relation to research on global migration.
Gender, in particular, has only been recently given proper attention in
migration studies. I participated in a much-needed critical assessment
of the works on gender and migration to date in a Social Science
Research Council sponsored working group together with anthropologist
Patricia Pessar, historian Donna Gabaccia, sociologist Katharine Donato
and political scientist Jennifer Holdaway. In our co-edited special
issue of the International Migration Review[2], we explored how
the various social science disciplines were engaging with the gender
question in migration. Our findings show that some disciplines such as
anthropology, history and sociology have been at the forefront of
engaging gender in migration studies, but others, such as economics,
were rather slow to engage with this issue. In their trenchant review
and agenda-setting essay on ethnography-based scholarship in this
volume, anthropologists Patricia Pessar and Sarah Mahler[3] put forward
a very productive view of gender as "relational," "contextualized" and
"multi-scalar." They both caution, echoing a previous review of the
field by Hodagneu Sotelo[4],
that in the process of "writing in" women's
experiences in migration, gender not be equated with "woman."
It would seem that this very simple yet vital precaution is not being
heeded by researchers conducting research on global domestic labor as
they proceed to examine the emotional underpinnings of the work involved
in this industry. This focus on emotional labor is part of the
"affective turn" (as one recently published book terms it) in both the
humanities and social sciences that has been both a source of concern
and celebration. It is undeniable that a focus on feelings and emotions
can be rewarding particularly as it may reveal structures of power.
Many scholars agree that gender and emotions are a crucial tandem that
enables the productive analysis and understanding of contemporary social
arrangements, particularly global labor flows.
As I have mentioned above, my own specific preoccupation on this
matter has been about recent research on the global movement of Third
World women to the First World to work as nannies and maids as
contextualized by the formation of the "chain of care." This conceptual
framework is constituted by structured relationships formed through the
flow and displacement of maternal affect. My purpose here is not to
disparage notable works on domestics; they all have made important
interventions. Rather, I want to initiate a critical dialogue around
the politics of affect that may push the research into a more creative
and expansive stage.
In the book Global Woman, the editors Barbara Ehrenreich and
Arlie Russell Hochschild[5]
point to the emerging and unequal flow of
affect between the Third World and First World. The "chain of care" is
a linear concatenation of bodies and feelings propelled by the migration
of Third World women to the First World. Third World women are torn
away from their biological families and forced to leave their children
in the care of poorer women in the homeland, to take care of the progeny
of modern working mothers of the first world. Therefore, the authors
suggest, Third World women take on the burden of First World women's
liberation from domesticity by providing emotional and physical labor
needed at the homes of the latter. This situation, they argue, causes a
"care drain" and a "global heart transplant," where the global domestic
labor market siphons off affective energies away from the poor countries
of the world as Third World women fracture households and leave families
motherless and wifeless. Therefore, this "chain" is forged primarily
through affective links constituted by biologically reproducing women of
the First and Third Worlds and the displacement of their affective and
physical labor from their biological families. The glue that keeps this
chain together in a linear fashion is the heterosexualized bodies of
both First and Third women while the fuel for the global dispersal of
migratory domestic labor is normative maternal love. Therefore, the
chain of care framework foregrounds the pathos of dislocated biological
motherhood.
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