Re-examining the Transnational Nanny

Abstract

This article explores whether the concept of a global care chain is useful in understanding the migration of careworkers internationally. It examines how an affective approach to understanding migration could supplement the care chain analysis by accounting for the overlapping, shifting, contingent and non-linear networks of emotion that arise during migrations. Analyzing carework through the lens of an “affective economy” is more revealing of the multiple experiences of Filipino gay and transgender caregivers in Tel Aviv and New York, Peruvian careworkers in Spain and Polish careworkers in Germany, as but three brief, illustrative examples. First I will discuss what the care chain approach can illuminate about the multiple and varied stories of migrant careworkers and how it may also essentialize or oversimplify their experiences. I will then suggest that the model naturalizes the caring, biological mother and reinforces geographical and ideological binaries such as North/South, winner/loser and domination/dependency. Finally, I will discuss how the care chain model presents a linear conception of time and space, obscuring the overlapping and multi-directional routes of migration that careworkers travel. Ultimately I will argue that an affective approach creates the theoretical language that can help build what Chela Sandoval calls a coalitional consciousness.

Keywords:

• care chain
• carework
• migration
• affect
• heteronormativity

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the readers and to Rosalind Petchesky, Martha Ackelsberg, Caryl Nuñez, Ajay Parasram and John McMahon for their comments and to Phyllis Palmer for her guidance.

Notes on contributor

Rachel H. Brown is a PhD candidate in Political Science at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her research focuses on care migration, gender and the emotionality of citizenship. Her doctoral dissertation explores how Israeli conceptions of citizenship are shaped by citizens’ relationships with migrant caregivers. She teaches as a Graduate Teaching Fellow in the Political Science department at Brooklyn College. She holds a BA in Middle East Studies from Brown University and a Master's degree in International Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Notes

1 In her other work, Ahmed discusses how the boundaries of the “stranger” are affectively formed (Ahmed 2000), and the affective formations of what it means to be home and away (Ahmed, Castaned, and Fortie 2003).

2 In her study of Latin American domestic workers in Europe, Gutierrez-Rodriguez (2010) explores how subjects become racialized and feminized. I also adopt this approach, but diverge slightly in my understanding of affect. In her formulation there is a greater distinction between affect and emotion: the former engages with “unspecifiied energies,” and the latter operates on a cognitive level (28). I instead follow Ahmed's conception of affective economies, which suggests that our emotions and orientations toward bodies are not only a result of cognitive judgment; rather, they are closely linked to the sensations of prior interactions with similar bodies. I also focus my discussion on the way emotions “stick” to subjects.

3 This term was coined and revisited by Guy Standing (1989, 1999).

4 According to Ingeborg Wick (2010), 70–90 percent of workers in 3,500 export processing zones over 130 countries are women.

5 According to the ILO (2013), women comprise 83 percent of domestic workers.

6 Moraga (1983) argues that a “theory in the flesh” arises out of embodied reality and leads to a “politic born out of necessity” (23); see also Sandoval (2000, 6). Relatedly, Beasley and Bacchi (2007) use the term “ethic of social flesh” in reference to an alternative vocabulary of “embodied sociality” (288). While an ethic of care is predicated upon normative interventions of trust, respect and generosity between atomistic individuals, social flesh is an ethical ideal based upon “shared embodied reliance.” It therefore resists altruistic distinctions between “weak” and “strong,” “givers” and “receivers” (293).

7 As Escriva (2005) describes, some caregivers may migrate to join other family members abroad and to help adult migrants care for their children, as is the case in one study of Peruvian sisters and grandmothers migrating seasonally or long-term to Spain.

8 As Puar (2007) argues in her discussion of Brian Massumi's “gridlock” (Massumi 2002, 3–4), whereas the individual is pre-social and bound in a “gridlock” of fixed time and space without movement, the assemblages of bodies, emotions, energies and affectivities that constantly reform and recombine in different intensities cannot be bound to a specific temporality, nor can it be contained within linear space.

9 Puar (2007) borrows the notion of “ontogenetic difference” and “ontogenetic priority” from Massumi to discuss “what one is and will continue to be” (215).