Feminine Jobs/Masculine Becomings

Abstract

Although there has been significant academic interest in the complex relationship between gender and migration, the relevant literature often focuses on women as victims of trafficking, sexism and racism in the host and sending societies. This article discusses instead the question of gender and migration as an open field of contestation within which transitory and incomplete identities are performed. Based on a series of focus group discussions with Albanian women working in the domestic sector in Athens, the article documents the emergence of a discourse of `becoming masculine' while performing typically `feminine tasks'. Drawing from Judith Butler's theoretical challenge to subject formation, the analysis traces the development of gender relations within discourse. While Albanian women are doubly disadvantaged in the mind—body relationship (first, because as migrants they are associated with manual, unskilled tasks, and second, because as women they are limited to the confines of private, domestic activities), they gradually come to perform roles that redefine the space of domesticity where the limits between men/women, private/public and migrants/nationals lie.