Selling Motherhood: Gendered Emotional Labor, Citizenly Discounting, and Alienation among China’s Migrant Domestic Workers

Abstract

The feminization of care migration in transnational contexts has received a great deal of attention. Scholars, however, have been slow to investigate a similar trend in intranational contexts. This paper expands existing research on global care chains by examining the gendered emotional labor of migrant domestic workers pertaining to China's intranational care chains. While the former often foregrounds "racial or ethnic discounting," the latter is characterized by "citizenly discounting" whereby migrant domestic workers are subject to an overarching system of alienation, subordination, and exploitation owning to their secondclass rural hùkŏu (household registration) status. Drawing on a participant-observation study of nannies, this article highlights how the intersection of gender and rural-urban citizenship is the key to grasping China's migrant domestic workers' experiences of extensive alienation at the nexus of work, family, and wider society. By delving into a particular set of political, economic, and cultural forces in the Chinese context, the article makes a distinctive contribution to a more nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of the interface of gender, emotional labor, and care migration.

Factors Affecting the Job Satisfaction of Caregivers in a Home-Based Elderly Care Program

“…Social insurance, which represents social protection and welfare from the state, plays the biggest role [ 59 ]. This result is consistent with findings of research on migrant workers that these workers from rural regions are treated as second-class citizens in cities because of the household register system in China [ 60 ]. However, marital status does affect their job satisfaction, which is different from the results of research on caregivers in other countries [ 38 , 39 , 40 , 41 ].…”

“…The results imply that a better relationship with clients might contribute to a higher level of job satisfaction among caregivers. These findings coincide with the literature on in-home caregivers’ labor process, which concludes that frequent conflict between clients and in-home caregivers might result in the distress of caregivers [ 60 ]. Home-based elderly care relies on face-to-face interaction between clients and caregivers.…”

Social action as ‘a total social phenomenon’: Comparing leadership challenges facing community-based labour organizations in China and Japan

“…As strong advocates of ‘rule-by-law’ ( fazhi ) and ‘human rights defenders’ ( weiquan) , leaders in China’s NGOs vociferously emphasized labour rights violations, but rarely linked these to hukou ’s institutional exclusion and cultural discrimination. For over half a century, hukou has institutionally legitimized two classes of citizenship whereby rural citizens are denied equal access to social welfare and subjected to abuse and exploitation by urban employers, as documented by numerous writers (Fu et al, 2018; Lee, 1998, 2007; Peng, 2011; Pun and Liu, 2010a, 2010b; Swider, 2015; Zhang, 2014). Similarly, in envisioning a better society, leaders in Japan’s community unions had largely failed to directly challenge persistent cultural assumptions regarding the male breadwinner-female dependent family model.…”

“… 10 The state’s neoliberal development discourses have dramatically transformed the image of peasants from Mao-era ‘liberation heroes’ to ‘modernization losers’, which often invoke ‘ suzhi ’ (quality) to problematize the peasant body as having low quality, lacking civility and hindering development (Fu et al, 2018: 818). …”

Heroines who are rebuilding their country: State–society circumstances and coping strategies of female leaders in post-genocide Rwanda

“…Women were not completely innocent during the massacre, as these extreme cases demonstrate. Despite the fact that women were less extensively and deeply involved in the killings than men, 7 they present a more complicated and diversified picture in the historical context (Hogg, 2001, 2010; Leggat-Smith, 1995; Sharlach, 1999).…”