Francesca Scrinzi

Masculinities and the International Division of Care: Migrant Male Domestic Workers in Italy and France

Drawing on ethnographic data concerning migrant male domestic workers, this article examines the gendered dimensions of the process of racialization in Italy and France. First, it shows that specific racialized constructions of masculinity are mobilized by the employers as well as by training and recruitment agencies. These constructions of masculinity are related to different forms of organization of the sector in each country and to different ideologies about the integration of migrants. Second, the data presented reveal the strategies used by migrant male domestic workers to reaffirm their masculinity in a traditionally feminized sector. In doing so, this article intends to explore the connections between international migration and the gendering of occupations, with regard to the construction and management of masculinities in domestic service. Finally, by examining men’s experiences, this article aims to contribute to a more complex definition of the international division of care work.

Introduction to the Special Issue: Men in a Woman’s Job, Male Domestic Workers, International Migration and the Globalization of Care

Very little scholarship exists, which investigates male domestic workers. Yet they constitute a highly interesting vantage point from which to analyze the gendered and racialized division of labor as well as the social constructions of masculinity in both contemporary societies and in the past. In several countries nowadays a large number of domestic workers are migrants. By focusing on men employed as domestic workers in different societies, in both the global North and the global South (Italy, France, United Kingdom, India, Ivory Coast, and Congo), the articles presented in this special issue investigate the gendered dimensions of globalization and international migration, while avoiding the essentialist association of ‘‘gender’’ with ‘‘women.’’ They cover a wide range of disciplines (sociology, anthropology, and history) and methodologies (both qualitative and quantitative). Despite this variety of themes and approaches, all identify domestic service as a site where ‘‘hegemonic’’ and ‘‘subaltern’’ masculinities are produced and negotiated at the interplay of multiple social relations. Therefore, they contribute to filling a gap in the recent scholarship about migrant domestic and care labor. Investigating male domestic workers’ practices and the social construction of masculinity within domestic service from the late nineteenth century to the current day, this special issue illustrates not only geographical but also historical variations.

gender, migration and the ambiguous enterprise of professionalizing domestic service: the case of vocational training for the unemployed in France

This article aims to contribute to current debates about international migration and the restructuring of the Welfare state in Europe, by highlighting the specificities of the French context. It draws on ethnographic research about the training of unemployed migrant women as domestic workers in Paris to address the ambiguities that underlie the enterprise of professionalizing domestic service. The qualitative data presented in the article show how essentialist ideologies operate within training practices of domestic workers. They reveal that the training practices challenge the association of the job with domesticity, but fail to acknowledge the racist organization of domestic service. Hence, they endorse essentialist constructions of cultural difference. Training practices are also consistent with current neoliberal policies and discourses on unemployment and ‘employability’, as they are framed by the normative reference to an entrepreneurial model of society. Finally, the data suggest that migrant womens experience of domestic service as a prospective job and their scepticism about the enterprise of professionalizing radically differ from the instructors’ views.

Outsourcing Elderly Care to Migrant Workers: The Impact of Gender and Class on the Experience of Male Employers

This article, based on semi-structured interviews, addresses masculinity in the international division of reproductive labour through an analysis of the impact of gender and class on the outsourcing of elderly care services to migrant care workers. In the Italian context, characterised by a limited provision of long-term care services and by cash-for-care benefits, the strategies of men as employers of migrant care workers are shaped by class and gender. The outsourcing of care to migrant workers reproduces hegemonic masculinity in so far as male employers are able to withdraw from the ‘dirty work’. At the same time, men engage with tasks which are, in principle, kept at a distance. The employers’ family status, combined with their class background, are crucial factors in shaping the heterogeneity of men’s experiences as employers and managers of care labour, and the ways in which they make sense of their masculinity.

A ‘New’ National Front? Gender, Religion, Secularism and the French Populist Radical Right

In 2011, Marine Le Pen succeeded her father as leader of the French National Front party. With the declared objective of transforming the NF into a large mainstream party with a vocation to govern, she engaged in an enterprise of ‘modernisation’ of the party’s public image. This chapter explores the relationship among gender, religion, secularism and the recent ideological developments in this party, by locating them in the specifics of the French political and cultural context. Firstly, the chapter sets the scene of Marine Le Pen’s ‘de-demonisation’ strategy, by presenting the heated and highly gendered public debates on multiculturalism, religion and secularism which have taken place in France in the past decades. Secondly, the chapter explores the gendered dimension of the NF ideology and its transformation. The conclusion points to changes and continuities which can be observed in the NF ideology in relation to women and gender.

Caring for the elderly in the family or in the nation? : gender, women and migrant care labour in the Lega Nord

Abstract This article aims at gendering our understanding of populist radical right ideology, policy and activism in Italy. It does so by focusing on migrant care labour, which provides a strategic site for addressing the relationship between anti-immigration politics and the gendered and racialised division of work. Three arrangements and understandings of elderly care are analysed, whereby care work should be performed ‘in the family and in the nation’, ‘in the family/outside the nation’ and ‘in the nation/outside the family’. Party documents and interviews with women activists are used to show how the activists’ views and experiences partly diverge from the Lega Nord rhetoric and policy on immigration, gender and care work. The article locates populist radical right politics in the context of the international division of reproductive labour in Italy and suggests the relevance of analysing gender relations in populist radical right parties in connection with national care regimes.

‘Subaltern victims’ or ‘useful resources’? Migrant women in the Lega Nord ideology and politics

This chapter focuses on how the Italian party of the Northern League mobilizes the issue of gender equality to legitimize its anti-immigration claims. By drawing on two qualitative studies of this populist radical right party, we shed light on the ‘double standard’ which the party applies to migrant men and women within its discourse and politics. We also show how this ‘double standard’ is negotiated by female activists. We argue that this is linked to the familistic system that the party supports. Within such a system migrant women play a key role as paid providers of social reproductive work. Combining ethnographic and documentary data, the chapter thus connects the issue of the gendered anti-immigration politics with recent debates on gendered migration and on the international division of care work.

Migrant Men in Europe and Beyond: Historical and Sociological Perspectives

This chapter reviews and discusses existing studies and data on the employment of migrant men in Europe and compares this context with other relevant geopolitical areas such as the USA and Asian countries. It places the analysis of the Italian case within a wider comparative perspective and highlights how the analysis of a specific national context is able to illuminate wider tendencies in the way contemporary changes in welfare and migration regimes intertwine with the gendered globalisation of reproductive labour. The chapter also locates the analysis of migrant men within the literature on the ‘global care chain’ and discusses the relevance of ethnicity to the study of men’s employment in feminised jobs.

Gender, Racism, and Migrant Reproductive Labour in Italy and Europe

This chapter locates the issues of racism, masculinities, and reproductive labour in the specifics of the Italian cultural and political context, connecting its national features to European tendencies. This chapter discusses how ethnicity, gender, and religion/secularism operate in Europe and in Italy to construct forms of exploitation and discrimination in specific occupational settings. Restrictive immigration policies are associated with public and political debates constructing racialised hierarchies based on ideas of gender, sexuality, and religion. In Italy, immigration policies confer on migrant men in paid domestic/care work the respectability they would otherwise lack. Here, (Christian) migrant men employed in the private sphere of the home emerge as the opposite and complementary figure to the threatening (Muslim) masculine Others who are hyper-visible in the public space.

Masculinity, Reproductive Labour, and Transnational Families

This chapter investigates migrant men’s experiences of conjugality and fatherhood and locates their narratives of love, sacrifice, and independence in the context of their transnational families. The chapter covers the trajectories of men who are inserted in a wider female-centred kinship network and who have reached Italy through legal family reunion or have arrived individually through regular or irregular migration. The analysis reveals how migration and men’s employment in paid domestic/care work can simultaneously challenge and reinforce gender hierarchies in migrant families. Drawing from their experiences of paid domestic/care work, migrant men renegotiate their position within the family by. However, the achievement of a more egalitarian gendered division of work within the migrant family depends on differences of generation and life-cycle.