In contemporary societies, reproductive labour has been increasingly recognised as an important context in which to map the gendered implications of global capitalism (Anderson 2000; Kofman and Raghuram 2015; Momsen 1999; Tyner 1999; Standing 1999; Williams 2010). In the Global North, the new demand for domestic/care services, supplied by cheap and flexible women labour from depressed non-Western economies, is linked to the restructuring of public care provision. This materialises in what scholars define as the ‘international division of reproductive labour’ (IDRL) (Parreñas 2001: 561), the ‘global nanny chain’ (Hochschild 2000: 33), or ‘the transnational political economy of care’ (Williams 2012: 364). In affluent immigration societies, privileged women purchase low-wage domestic/care services from migrant women, who, in turn, rely on lower-wage paid domestic/care work provided by more disadvantaged women who look after their families ‘left behind’ in their home countries. This ‘outsourcing’ of domestic/care tasks relies on migrant (mostly female) labour, which is made flexible and precarious by restrictive immigration policies.
This book explores the gendered experiences of migrant men and the social construction of racialised masculinities in the context of the IDRL. It responds to the need to fully recognise the role gender plays in the relationship between globalisation, migration, and domestic/care labour by bringing men back into the analysis of how new patterns of consumption and provision of paid domestic/care work lead to forms of inequality across racial, ethnic, gender, and class lines (cf. Kilkey et al. 2013a). By bridging the established recent literature on international migration and paid domestic/care work with the emerging scholarship on migration and masculinity (Ryan and Webster 2008; Donaldson et al. 2009; Hearn et al. 2013; Kilkey et al. 2010; Sarti and Scrinzi 2010), the book innovatively explores the practices and experiences of migrant men employed as domestic/care workers. It highlights how migrant men’s experiences of both paid domestic/care work and the family are shaped by global forces and structures, as well as by changing welfare systems and care and immigration regimes, and how men negotiate the changes and potential conflicts that their involvement in reproductive labour may entail. It does so by developing a comparative analysis between the working and family lives of migrant men and women engaged within the IDRL. It also analyses the impact of legal, religious, socio-economic, and political forces on migrants’ lives as well as how they actively try to negotiate their identities, social relations, and prospects of mobility in the process.
Masculinities, Migration, and Globalisation
Migrant domestic labour represents an important object of enquiry in understanding racism, as the IDRL ‘provides a critical example of the structural arrangement of resources based on racism, ethnicity and citizenship status’ (Moras 2008: 245). In the last decade, scholars writing in both feminist and masculinity studies have increasingly recognised the need for a more relational analysis of how gender is involved in globalisation, and have argued that the understanding of femininities cannot be disentangled from the analysis of their relation to masculinities (Ward 1993; Connell 1998; Fernandez-Kelly and Wolf 2011; Poster 2002). The move beyond a unitary and essentialist view of gender has required not only the recognition of the co-existence of a plurality of femininities and masculinities in specific social contexts, but also the understanding of the hierarchies that structure relations between different groups of men and of women (Connell 1987; Collins 1999).
The almost exclusive focus on women that accompanied pioneering studies of gender in global factories (Fuentes and Ehrenreich 1984; Ong 1983; Hsiung 1996; Sassen 1998; Lee 1998) and pink-collar sectors (Freeman 2000) has prompted scholars to interrogate what models of hegemonic hyper-masculinity underpin the expansion of corporate capitalism and global institutions (Jackall 1988; Hacker 1989; Reed 1996; Woodward 1996; Beneria 1999). In this line of research, ethnographies of men and masculinities in business corporations and supranational institutions have importantly questioned the persistent gender-neutral approach of research on men, work, and the economy (Acker 2004). They have also mapped similarities and differences between colonial masculinities, largely based on violence and domination, and models of globalising hegemonic masculinities centred upon claims of expertise and professional status (Connell 1998). By connecting the analysis of the feminisation of labour—and the resulting affirmation of subordinated models of femininities—with the understanding of hegemonic models of hyper-masculinity, these studies have jointly mapped the working of patriarchal power within the global economy. This book, however, questions the persistent tendency to assume that masculinity is forged in the ‘outsider’ domain of institutionalised work settings as opposed to the ‘private’ sphere of the home. Indeed, two important reviewers of gender in the global workplace (Aker 2004; Poster 2002) seem to build their analysis in a dual manner. Firstly, they point out the importance of racialisation and sexuality in global domestic labour. Secondly, they consider masculinities in the context of globalisation. However, while both these studies advocate intersectional analysis of masculinity, sexuality, and racialisation (albeit in different ways), these issues are not brought directly into the questioning of gender in domestic labour and occupational culture. Instead, recent work has pointed to the relevance of the home and of reproductive labour as sites where hegemonic masculinities are produced and negotiated at the interplay of multiple social relations (Sarti and Scrinzi 2010; Kilkey 2010). Furthermore, pioneering work on masculinity and migrant domestic work in the UK and the USA has shown that middle-class men often come to play a direct and agentic role in driving demand for commodified domestic/care services. The analysis developed by Kilkey, Perrons, and Plomien shows how men play an important role in the reproduction of gendered and racialised stereotypes within the domestic/care sector and how the construction of middle-class identity as professionals and also as fathers increasingly relies on the outsourcing of reproductive labour (Kilkey et al. 2013a).
Overall, it is important to remark here how ‘women are not assigned to positions in processes of production and reproduction entirely by the imperatives of an all-powerful patriarchy, nor do men freely choose the nature, content and extent of the domestic production they engage by virtue of their gender’ (Jackson 2001: 5). Indeed, it should be noted that men do not only participate in the exploitation and marginalisation of women in the global economy, but are also subject to the pressures of globalisation. Indeed, as Connell has noted, globalising forms of hegemonic masculinity also gives rise to the emergence of subordinated models of manhood, a fact that compels scholars to adopt a ‘more holistic understanding of gender hierarchies by also recognising the agency of subordinate groups’ (Connell 2005: 848). A better understanding of gender hierarchies and of the historical interplay between femininities and masculinities necessitates the analysis of masculinities among marginalised ethnic groups, alongside the consideration of how middle-class women ‘may appropriate aspects of hegemonic masculinity in constructing corporate or professional careers’ (ibid: 847–48).
In this context, international migration has only recently started to be recognised as an area of enquiry of subordinated masculinities. As studies of Asian men in Gulf and Western countries show, migration for men implies experiences of deskilling and loss of status, which undermine their ability to act as men both in the receiving context and back in their homeland (Margold 1995; George 2005; Gamburd 2000). Importantly, these studies have pointed out the need to consider downward mobility not only in terms of class but also in its implications for gender (Ryan and Webster 2008). Migration challenges men’s public status and their roles as husbands, fathers, and householders, and increasingly pressures them to live up to new family and social expectations (Osella and Osella 2000; Charsley 2005; Gallo 2006). As for women, the global labour market, as well as women’s reinsertion into migration national policies, favours the deskilling and hard-working docility of migrant men and makes women more vulnerable in social, legal, and health terms (Herbert 2008; Walter et al. 2004; Haggis and Schech 2009). In many receiving contexts, migrants have increasingly become objects of securitising and racialising discourses, which construct migrant masculinity as a source of dangerous and hyper-sexual behaviour and as a threat to national well-being and identity. While the scholarship focusing on racialised masculinity and migration is growing, it, however, remains limited (Donaldson et al. 2009; Charsley 2005; George 2005; Ahmad 2011; Pasura 2008; Batnitzky et al. 2009).
Overall, and partly as the result of primary attention being paid to hegemonic forms of masculinities, the impact of migration on men’s experiences and on the hierarchical pluralisation of masculinities has been largely undertheorised (Hibbins and Pease 2009; Messner 1997). There is a pressing need to fully acknowledge migrant men as gendered social actors1 in order to unravel how migration underpins the social construction of masculinities (Datta et al. 2009; Willis and Yeoh 2000) and to recognise the complex and multi-layered experiences of migrant men beyond their assumed role as exclusively economic subjects (Kofman and Raghuram 2015). The lack of gendered analysis of men’s migration can be partly explained by referring to the gender-blind theories that have long dominated migration studies (Kofman 1999). While neoclassical economic theories have been centred on individual interest-based decisions and the push–pull factor, Marxist-inspired structuralist approaches have, to a large extent, focused on capital and labour dynamics (Castles and Kosack 1973; Harzing 2001; Peach 1968; Phizacklea and Miles 1980). Migration scholars have wrestled between ‘overly optimistic renditions of the agency of male migrants and their ability to act rationally in response to economic motivations’, as in ‘push–pull’ explanations, and other renditions negating ‘any such agency in favour of more structuralist explanations of migration’, as in studies within the Marxist political economy approach (Datta et al. 2009: 855). There has indeed been a persistent dualism in the conceptualisation of ‘men’s migration’ and ‘women’s migration’.2 While labour migration has usually been conceptualised as a male economic endeavour and explained in relation to structural forces, female migration has been traditionally explained in terms of personal motives, such as those related to family reunion, and less in terms of structural forces. Economic and ‘public’ factors are more often used to explain male migration than female migration, and therefore male migration has not been conceptualised in relation to ‘private’ events and motives related to the family (Donato et al. 2006; Morokvasic 1983). The breadwinning role of migrant men and men’s experiences and understanding of family relations have, to a large extent, been taken for granted. Tellingly, studies in transnational household practices and emotional labour have mainly focused on migrant women (Baldassar 2008; Baldassar and Merla 2013; Maehara 2010; Hall 2008), with scholars highlighting how gender is constituted through acts of transnational communication in ‘mother-away families’ (Parreñas 2005: 319; Boccagni 2009a ), how migrant mothers try to compensate for physical and emotional distance through transnational kin work (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 2004; Asis et al. 2004; Pessar and Mahler 2003), how women cope with the fear of losing control of their children’s lives but also the latter’s trust and attachment, and how women face the challenge of rebuilding conjugal and parental relations after family reunion (Mason 2004; Boccagni 2012; Zontini 2004). Pione...