Women’s Labour in Movement. From Servant and Housewife to Racialised Domestic and Care Workers

This paper examines migrant women’s labour and the embodied and affective experiences of poor and racialised working women amid the current care crisis. In the first section, I reconstruct the feminist critiques of Marxist political economy alongside Decolonial and Postcolonial feminist perspectives on the Marxist universal capitalist (re)production model. This offers a different genealogy compared to the linear historical perspective found in certain Western social reproduction and care theories. Drawing on Postcolonial and Decolonial feminisms, I argue for a broader notion of caring labour that goes beyond the shortcomings and pitfalls of Anglo and Eurocentric theorisations. In the second part, I focus on the embodied and affective experiences of poor, black, brown and indigenous Mexican, Indian and Filipino women to identify concrete mechanisms and relations of exploitation, oppression and violence produced in the migration process that sustain global care chains. I claim that nothing less than the reconceptualisation of a Deco- and Postcolonial Marxist feminist political economy can address the problems arising from the current care crisis. In the final section, I highlight the inherent ambivalences of global care chains as both a process of neocolonial feminisation of migration and reproduction of neoliberal capitalism and as a shared context of struggle and resistance grounded in situated experiences. My aim is to show how women in the Global South’s concrete experiences and conceptualisations of exploitation and domination have enriched Western feminist theory of women’s struggles for autonomy and liberation.