Lena Näre

Sri Lankan Men Working as Cleaners and Carers: Negotiating Masculinity in Naples:

Drawing on an intersectional approach, the article examines how Sri Lankan domestic workers’ masculinities are constructed and negotiated in conjunction with race and ethnicity by Neapolitan employers and the male domestic workers themselves. The article discusses how Neapolitan employers construct Sri Lankan masculinity as effeminate, asexual, and unthreatening and how these Sri Lankan men themselves strategically exploit these stereotypes in gaining access to jobs that are socially constructed as women’s work. However, in relation to their own community and families, and quite contrary to the Neapolitan employers’ stereotypes, Sri Lankan men negotiate rather hegemonic and traditional notions of masculinity. The article draws on ethnographic research conducted in Naples including participant observation within the Sri Lankan community and in-depth interviews with Sri Lankan male and female domestic workers, as well as with Neapolitan employers of Sri Lankan male domestic workers. By looking at the experiences of these migrant men, the article contributes to the understanding of how intersectional categories work in different and often contractory ways in the everyday negotiations of subjectivities. The article draws our attention to how racial and ethnic differences can be strategically deployed by the members of a specific group. It also concludes that there is no fixed notion of Sri Lankan masculinity. Rather, it is contextualized and constructed quite differently by Neapolitan employers and Sri Lankan men themselves.

Migrancy, Gender and Social Class in Domestic Labour and Social Care in Italy: An Intersectional Analysis of Demand

Since the 1980s, welfare provision in Italy has been dramatically transformed, due to demographic changes, changes in gender orders and, most importantly, the increased employment of migrants for domestic and care work. Drawing first on statistical data, I explore how the intersections of ‘migrancy’ and gender configure in the domestic-work and social-care sector in Italy. I conclude that, even though gender remains the most important stratifying factor in this field, migrancy is almost as important. I then explore the demand for domestic work and the different forms of care work through in-depth interviews with Neapolitan employers in Naples. I posit that the demand for housekeepers is a class-specific phenomenon related to a particular life-style, including the traditional gendered division of labour and a symbolic hierarchy of household tasks according to which certain jobs are deemed too ‘dirty’ for the ‘madams’, or female employers. The demand for childcarers, on the other hand, is more connected to Italian womens increasing labour participation and mens absence from caring responsibilities. However, here, too, social class is not irrelevant. It affects the demand for elderly care in a slightly different way: the availability of an inexpensive migrant labour force, combined with state subventions, has made it possible for families from lower social strata to employ home carers.

The Moral Economy of Domestic and Care Labour: Migrant Workers in Naples, Italy

This article proposes the notion of moral economy as a useful lens for the analysis of migrant domestic and care work. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in Naples, Southern Italy, it argues that paid domestic and care work relationships are based on a moral economy, i.e. on notions of good/bad, just/unjust rather than merely economic profit maximization. There is a tendency to transform labour relationships into family-like relationships due to the locus of domestic work within the privacy of households and the nature of domestic labour relationships as highly personalized. However, in contrast to the existing research literature, many migrant workers feel that being treated like part of the family characterizes the best possible work relationship.

Ideal Workers and Suspects

Abstract The article explores the emerging migrant division of care labour in Finland. Drawing on statistical data, it first discusses how the social and health care sector is increasingly relying on foreign-born workers. Then, drawing on qualitative data and Nancy Fraser’s politics of recognition, the article analyses how Finnish employers recognise migrants as potential workers. Although employers seek to resist essentialising differences, migrant care workers are recognised as different from the norm due to their migrancy, that is, social status as migrants. There is an inherent dualism of being ideal and suspect simultaneously that functions as a practice to partially include migrant employees in work-places defined by the norm of Finnishness.

Glocalising Care in the Nordic Countries

* E-mail: sirpa.wrede@helsinki.fi This Special Issue examines the position of migrant-background care workers in Nordic care work regimes. The issue takes part in a research dialogue that is emerging between researchers coming from two main fields: migration studies and research on migrants in the labour markets, and the scholarship on care work in the context of changing welfare-state arrangements in the Nordic countries. The special contribution of this Special Issue is to introduce the concept of glocalisation which provides an analytical link to the two, previously mentioned largely separate strands of literature on migrant-background care workers. Deriving from macro-sociological debates where it was introduced to emphasise the cultural dynamics of globalisation (Robertson 1995, Roudometof 2005), the concept here calls attention to the role of globalisation in the changing Nordic care regimes, but not as a deterministic force that transforms the different local regimes according to one model that reflects globalisation. Instead, this cultural interpretation of globalisation calls for the need to pay attention both to the role of non-local globalising discourses and to the emerging local arrangements in which the non-local discourses are interpreted for the specific contexts of the local regime. Our aim is not to emphasise the unavoidability of convergence or to celebrate divergence. Instead the glocalisation argument calls attention to the fact that the characteristics of the social embeddedness of care work regimes are not fixed. In this vein, we argue that the impact of globalisation on care work regimes may be best understood if we consider glocalisation as a dynamic mix of convergence and divergence (Saltman 1997). Accordingly, care work organisation needs to be examined in specific localities, taking into consideration both the travel of ideas and the activities of the people with whom they travel, the reshaping of practices and the experiences of people affected. In the following, we approach the issue of migrant-background care workers in the context of glocalising care work regimes from the perspective of the two research fields mentioned above. The two research fields provide two different perspectives about how the position of migrant care workers has evolved: one focusing on the care work regime and the other focusing on international migration and movement of people. The attention lies on how unique historic constellations play into the particularities of glocalisation. In the context of on-going societal transformations involving neoliberal reforms and long-term demographic developments, Nordic care regimes suffer a particularly severe deficit of care labour at the same time as the Nordic region constitutes an increasingly attractive region in the context of global mobilities. In the final part of this introduction we present the articles in this issue that describe what happens when new people enter a care work regime that is itself undergoing transformation.

The making of 'proper' homes: Everyday practices in migrant domestic work in Naples

Changing from a country of emigration into one of immigration has been one of the major phenomena of Italian society in recent years. One of the realms where this has been most evident is in Italian households employing migrants for domestic service and care work. This article looks at domestic and care practices in the everyday life of a Neapolitan household. Based on participant observation conducted in Giuseppes apartment, it shows how the traditional Neapolitan way of life can be maintained by employing a live-in worker. It discusses some of the contradictions and tensions involved in this kind of work, and, by looking at everyday life, it also questions depictions of vulnerable migrant workers at the mercy of their employers.

The Ethics of Transnational Market Familism: Inequalities and Hierarchies in the Italian Elderly Care

This article examines the recent transformations of the Italian welfare state from a familist welfare model to what I term transnational market familism. In this model, families buy in care labour, commonly provided by migrant workers. There is now a growing literature exploring both the transformations of the Italian welfare model and the experiences of migrant workers providing care in Italy. However, what has been overlooked in the current literature is the ethical aspect of this model of welfare provision, which is part of the transnational political economy of care. The article analyses the ethical implications of the migrant-in-the-family model, which transforms the care relationship between the caregiver and care receiver into a complex relationship between the family member organising care, the migrant caregiver and the dependent care receiver. The context of such welfare provision is transnational. Examining this care triangle, I draw on care ethics and individualization perspective for an analysis of how social policies safeguard, or overlook, human interaction and care relationships in the context of global hierarchies. The article draws on ethnographic data gathered in Naples, Italy, during 2004–2005, including interviews with Neapolitan employers and elderly care-receivers, interviews with migrant workers, as well as participant observations.

Ageing in transnational contexts: transforming everyday practices and identities in later life

ABSTRACT This Special Issue on ‘Ageing in Transnational Contexts: Transforming Everyday Practices and Identities in Later Life’ extends our understanding of how ageing is experienced in transnational contexts. It focuses on how everyday lives and identities in older age are being negotiated by individuals who have migration histories or who are affected by the mobilities of others in their lives. In the introduction, we situate our approach within an emerging strand of research investigating the inter-related processes of ageing and transnational migration. We also present the seven empirical case studies that constitute the issue and discuss their collective contribution for the research field.

Neoliberal postcolonialism in the media: Constructing Filipino nurse subjects in Finland:

In 2007, a private recruitment agency started recruiting nurses from the Philippines to private elderly care homes and to operation wards in Finland. Although less than a hundred nurses have been recruited to Finland, the recruitment has received extensive media attention. Applying discourse analysis to the media data, the article analyzes the ways in which Filipino subjects were constructed by the Finnish media. We distinguish three types of categories relating to Filipino nurses as ‘good migrant/suspect worker’, ‘global commodity’ and as a ‘colonized subject’. The article argues that the discourse depicting Filipino subjects is a form of neoliberal postcolonialism, which combines a global geography of colonial power with a discourse of individualized economic risks and responsibilities.

Identity and ambivalence in everyday transnationalism: older-aged Gujaratis in London

ABSTRACT This article analyses questions of belonging amongst elderly Gujaratis who live in North London but maintain connections with India and East Africa. Belonging, which encompasses both the sense and practices of belonging, is a useful concept for analysing identity-related matters. This research argues that identity and belonging are important for subjective and emotional well-being in old age. This target group practises belonging locally and through transnational mobility, which follows an annual rhythm. However, increasing bodily frailty related to ageing reduces this mobility. Moreover, this article examines belonging-related ambivalences that arise in old age and that stem from dislocation experiences and contradictions that individuals encounter when confronting racialised and patriarchal social structures. In conclusion, the article calls for the integration of older individuals’ experiences into the mainstream identity and belonging research.