Disposable kin: Shifting registers of belonging in global care economies

Abstract

As is well discussed in the literature, paid domestic workers become like kin through living with and caring for their employers. Exploring two disparate cases, aging Asian domestic workers in Singapore and African eldercare workers in the United States, the article focuses on two critical junctures when these kin relations are disavowed: the care worker's retirement and the death of a patient. We argue that the flexible registers of kinship that characterize care workers' relationships with their employers revert, at the end of employment, to fixed notions of kinship based on blood and marriage.These essentialist understandings of kinship arise around inheritance and the worker's care in older age and in illness, enabling employers, states, and private care agencies to avoid post-employment obligations to domestic workers. The fluctuation between kinship-as-doing and kinship-as-essence marginalizes domestic workers in a globalized economy as disposable kin, denying their belonging as citizens or social equals.

Reciprocity and intimate capital in household work: Exchanging love and care for labor rights in contemporary Buenos Aires

“…I concur with Amrith and Coe (2022) that household workers’ positions in the families they work for cannot and should not be reduced to that of family members. I also follow these authors’ understanding of kinship as a malleable and ambivalent register of belonging in household work.…”

“…Amrith and Coe's (2022) and Danielsen's (2021) observations of the deployment of registers of kinship in household work are echoed in the broader economic anthropological literature on kinship/reciprocity and work/labor, which documents how work and labor relationships are entangled with kinship and reciprocal ones. This literature shows how, in rural contexts, kinship and reciprocal rights and obligations completely overlap with customary labor rights and obligations (e.g., Allen, 2002; Chibnik and de Jong, 1989; Du, 2002; Pine, 2000).…”

Exploitation, Harassment and Violence: Lived Experiences of Women Paid Domestic Workers in India

“…According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), women DWs are further exposed to additional challenges such as unfixed, and uncertain employment contracts, serving multiple employers, probability of disguised and ambiguous employment relationships, little to no access to social protection and benefits, and substantial legal and practical impediments to engaging with a trade union and bargaining collectively (ILO, 2011). In this context, ambiguous employer relationships are typically manifested through the kinning of DWs which is central to their exploitation (Amrith & Coe, 2022). An example of kinning occurs in the way women PDWs are addressed in employer households in developing nations.…”

“…This may also expose the PDW to additional work without pay under the pretext of kinship loyalty (Anderson 2006;Raghuram & Momsen, 1993). Since the duties and responsibilities of a PDW comprise working within the private space of employers and developing a certain intimacy with their personal and familial activities, tensions between the employee and employer seem to occur extensively within this profession (Amrith & Coe, 2022;Gurtoo, 2016;Rollins, 1985).…”

Harmonizing the rural Indigenous family: Mestiza gender trustees and the gendered modernization of rural Mexico

“…Candy described her positive memories of kind employers as those who treated her “equally as though [she] were a full person” or “as a daughter.” While scholars have often critiqued domestic workers for euphemizing class relations by appealing to familial idioms in their definition of good treatment (see Goldstein, 2003; Rollins, 1985), Candy's experience of humanization as a kind of gendered kinning suggests that such appeals may be a way racialized domestic workers make claims to humanity (see also Romero, 1992, 125). This is not to say that being gendered or kinned is inherently equalizing since such relationships are themselves crosscut by differences, including age, class, and nationality (see Amrith and Coe, 2022). Rather, such appeals point to emic understandings of humanity as embodied and kinned, notions that liberal equality erases even as it presumes maleness and whiteness (Fraser, 1990).…”