An introduction to the issue from the Feminist Review Collective
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an introduction to the issue from the Feminist Review Collective
People are on the move across the globe, seeking labour elsewhere. While some ‘jog-trot’ across borders (Balibar, 2002: 83), and others negotiate the ever changing legal remit of border controls, a significant number risk their lives to get to those parts of the world where (a) the bread is buttered and (b) their labour is needed. This special issue of Feminist Review brings the following contributions edited by the collective to sit alongside those brought to us by the guest editors Parvati Raghuram and Eleonore Kofman. The demand for immaterial labour in the form of care work is increasingly met by women who travel across the world only to be positioned in less favourable conditions of employment from the ‘locals’. The stratification of reproductive labour is inflected by class in conjunction with ‘race’ and nation. The points of intersection are however in no way configured in predictable patterns. In ‘Contextual Politics of Difference in Transnational Care: the Rhetoric of Filipina Domestics’ Employers in Taiwan’ Shu-ju Ada Cheng pays attention to how Taiwanese employers discursively construct the otherness of Filipina domestics, many of whom are highly educated. She alerts us to how difference is localized in a transnational system of care that naturalizes the otherness of foreign domestics. Identity construction is in this discussion an interminable part of labour relations. Sabine Hess and Annette Puckhaber insist on the importance of a transnational analyses of the similar and differing relations of power in care work. Using multi-sited ethnography in the movement, back and forth, of au pairs across Europe and the United States, they draw our attention to conflicting expectations. While au pairs see themselves as participants in cultural exchange programs, the host families view them as labourers. Located between employment contract and being a member of the familial, they occupy and negotiate the complex terrain of being neither. So often they witness a lack of recognition and dignity in the intimacy of what is simultaneously their public and private domain. Layers of spatial separation that may mark them out in the ‘home’ however do not stop them from building collectivities and strategies of empowerment with other, similarly placed, au pairs. Kaori Nagai reminds us of the long history of care work and the myriad distinctions that operate within and through it. This article takes a close look
feminist review 77 2004 c 2004 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/04 $15 www.feminist-review.com (1–3)
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at how colonial distinctions enabled Florence Nightingale to establish herself as an authoritative female subject in the public domain. Kaori Nagai identifies how the Lady with the Lamp assumed the voice of imperial England by suppressing other competing female voices of care. The service of the Irish nuns in the Crimean War was erased as their presence threatened to cancel out Nightingale’s aspiring (imperial) political femininity. The place of Irela
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