Collective Review on “Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction” and “Care in Context – Transnational Gender Perspectives”

Citation

Jüssen, L. (2018), "Collective Review on “Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction” and “Care in Context – Transnational Gender Perspectives”", Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 432-435. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-10-2017-0224

Collective Review on “Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction” and “Care in Context – Transnational Gender Perspectives”

Women and care work have always been connected and since the fortification of the more recent women’s movements of the 1970s, have become the analytic interest of academics of the social sciences. Today, gender, as it is debated in the global North sometimes threatens to tip over the top, or, to lose its topic of debate with regard to women empowerment. A class perspective evidences that not all women are in need of empowerment or support in the same way, while ethnicity appears rather as question of migration. In the global South, both women empowerment and related questions of gender are pressing, however, it should be watched that gender debates do not end up taking in questions of women empowerment, for instance if gay pride overrules abortion rights. Ethnicity and class as additional analytical concepts then need to be used carefully in order to enable the recognition of oppressions of women reliably, so that feminist social sciences do not get stuck in a fight about global inequalities in short-sighted ways. Both books reviewed here take gender as title giving concept, even if the focus on care and care work implies a strong focus on women, women’s work and feminist theory, while gender as overarching concept of social relations between men and women, as gendered identity, or as concept of sexuality underlie, nonetheless. Both books also use a transnational approach, one, however, focussing on migrants from the global South engaged in care work sectors in the global North, the other one comparing the care work sector in a country of the global South with the care work sector in a country of the global North. So, care and gender in transnational perspectives are topics of both books subject of this collective review.

Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction by Eleonore Kofman and Parvati Raghuram, focusses on how migrants of the global South correspond to the need for care workers in countries of the global North and how they are affected by restrictive conditions of labour markets and migration laws. The authors elaborate on the place of care work and reproduction within global South-North migrations by developing views to care and reproduction into an analysis of Welfare regimes. They also enquire the care diamond (family/household, state, market, and the non-for-profit sector as suggestions for the analysis of care providing actors), skills analysis and reproductive work, migration regimes, intersectionality and inequality. The rich theoretical analysis rests upon an abundance of locally diverse examples, which, however, make it sometimes challenging to maintain an overarching understanding. The main innovation the book presents lies within the skills analysis, as it expands the concept “body” that feminist academics of labour use in order to refine the specific qualities of care workers, by introducing embrained skills as a new type of skill, besides embodied, encultured, and encoded skills as embedded forms of knowledge.

Care in Context. Transnational Gender Perspectives, edited by Vasu Reddy, Stephan Meyer, Tamara Shefer and Meyiwa Thenjiwe, is a compilation of 21 texts by different authors upon care and gender in Switzerland and South Africa, structured into four parts: theories and concepts of care; policy imperatives and care; practices and models of care; narratives of care. It combines texts that develop concepts, philosophies and policies of care and applies them by presenting case studies from the two countries. Important theoretical debates that thread argumentative lines throughout the different texts of the book centre upon the “care diamond”, which is expanded into a “care star” by one author, who adds the community as the community as care work actor; questions of social cohesion and the African community philosophy of Ubuntu; a feminist debate upon connectivity and care as preferred by feminist theory vs autonomy and social justice as preferred by more patriarchally influenced social theory. Adding the community as care work actor by one author, questions of social cohesion and the African community philosophy of Ubuntu, a feminist debate upon connectivity and care as preferred by feminist theory vs autonomy and social justice as preferred by social theory more influenced by patriarchal views. Further topics are the two countries’ welfare regime characteristics and healthcare systems, discussed as central political structures for the organisation of care work. This analysis is specifically relevant in South Africa due to the high prevalence of HIV, while in Switzerland, rather, care for elderly people dominates the care work debate.

As stated, an innovative analytical conceptualisation introduced in Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction concerns the authors approach to skills. As already introduced, care is describable as embodied non-material labour, which is generally related to workers’ bodily characteristics as relevantly involved in the realisation of care work. Eleonore Kofman and Parvati Raghuram interestingly reposition the paradigm of the care working body by elaborating upon necessary skills that partially also apply to the body. A focus on skills accentuates the professionality of care work, and, so, adds value to it, in spite of a general declassification of care work as deskilled, unqualified work, done by women. Even though it could be theoretically more elaborated, Kofman and Raghuram’s conceptualisation of skills as embodied, encultured, (culturally) encoded and embrained calls attention to what is describable as a feminist reconeptualisation of skills, which are specifically needed to perform quality care and reproductive work. Knowledge in form of culturally encoded and encultured skills is especially relevant for migrant care workers. The reformulation of manual workers’ skills as embodied and embrained highlights a distinctiveness of care labour as not only a job which affects and involves the workers’ body, but also its’ capacity to be emotionally involved by being attentive to the needs of others, anticipating them, or reacting to them, and by maintaining a certain emotional attitude of responsible, enabling and good care. How migrant workers’ skills are differentially valued or devalued, e.g. upon where they were acquired, but also how they can be lost through mobility of skilled care workers, is elaborated upon for nursing, teaching and parenting in Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction.

The first chapter of Care in Context, preceding the four parts of the book, and the books’ first part “Theories and concepts of care”, present philosophies and theories of care and the African community philosophy of Ubuntu. Vivienne Bozlak (chapter 3) develops a framework for evaluating care, welfare, social cohesion and social justice based on: Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sens’ capabilities approach aimed at enabling well-being and good life; Nancy Frasers’ social justice approach aimed at participatory parity, redistribution and recognition; and, Joan Trontos’ ethics of care based on attentive, responsible, competent, and responsive care practices. She also introduces a debate taken up by other authors of the book according to which relationality, interdependence, and connectivity are preferred by women and feminist theory, while autonomy, independence, and social justice were rather preferred by more patriarchally influenced social theory. This feminist view upon the underlying principles of care are interpretable as being in line with Ubuntu which is opposed to a purely quantitative way of doing care as political engineering and is rather based on a cosmological sum-totality of a qualitative experience as Mpilo Pearl Sithole (chapter 5) explains with regard to South African planning of land use, and on communal connectivity and equity, as Grace Khunou (chapter 11) adds in his chapter on men’s health and HIV in South Africa.

Mokhantšo Makoae’s text (chapter 7) on maternity healthcare and children’s’ rights, elaborates the idea of gendering interdependence as female and independence as male into a somewhat uneasy opposition between an ethics of care preferred by women and a supposedly male ethics of justice and rights. As women do care work, often unpaid, and as the reason for analysing gender and care work is to enhance both the situation of the cared for and of the care worker, including their rights, it should be cautioned not to reproduce interdependence as burden or rights as care’s opposite or of an opposite of feminism, which has always been concerned with women’s rights. In the sense of softening the opposition, in the chapter before, Amanda Gouws and Mikki van Zyl (chapter 6) assert that autonomy is not absolute and care should help recipients to become more autonomous while the negotiations of the terms of care can be regarded as a practice of autonomy. In name of a Southern ethics of care, the authors go on to enlarge the four-edged “care diamond” into a five-edged “care star” by adding Ubuntu as communal site of care, while the “care diamond” used as conceptual tool in both books, has the: family or household, the voluntary or non-for-profit sector, the market, and the state as what might be called sites, actors, or levels of analysis of care provision.

As Sarah Razavi (chapter 2) explains, the “care diamond” intends to avoid the reduction of the analysis of care work to the family or household level, and, instead, to show the importance of other actors in their care provision. In both books, the analysis done according to the “care diamond” focusses upon how its different sites of care provision are gendered, or, as for the state, how its laws and rules upon care provision are gendered. The “care diamond” might even be regarded as an analytical tool for analysing different manifestations of welfare regimes, or governmentalities of care localised between its edges. It is used as such especially in analysis of Northern countries’ care sectors: in Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction chapter 4, that thematises the sites of that thematises the sites of the “care diamond” also thematises welfare regimes with regard to migrants’ roles and possibilities therein and ends by enlarging both concepts to include transnational families and global householding. Care sector analysis always have to do with describing the relation of public, state provision of care and private provision of care, feminists claiming stronger takeover of care responsibilities by the state to discharge women or increase the value of care labour. In Care in Context several chapters especially in part 2 and 3 engage in this undertaking, as e.g. with regard to prenatal care, child care, home-based care for people with HIV-related disease in South Africa or for elderly people in Switzerland, while also the design of the welfare regime itself is topic of analysis as in the text of Peter Streckeisen (chapter10), who analyses the historical development of the welfare state in Switzerland and describes its current design of healthcare politics as neoliberally imbued, as it includes an extensive private, market-based component.

From a Northern perspective, the concept of the “welfare state” or “welfare regime” and the state as actor within the “care diamond” nonetheless partially overlap. This is explained, as the concepts evolved differently: the idea of welfare and the welfare state developed in the post-war era in Northern states as the idea of a more or less involved state care for citizens. Southern welfare regimes, however, are usually referred to as familialist, and therewith reposition the original idea of state organisation of welfare towards the family, the “opposite” actor within the “care diamond”. Furthermore, with regard to Amanda Gouws and Mikki van Zyls’ (chapter 6) already mentioned “care star”, enlarged through the site of the community in line with the Ubuntu philosophy, it might be doubted in how far overlappings with the voluntary, non-for-profit sector are sufficient to argue it to be a separate site. In any case, the concept is used as a tool for analysis with reference to Sarah Razavi by several authors of the book, while Ubuntu is separately referred to as a philosophy of communal practice based on principles of equity. In this sense, the way, for example, home-based care for people with HIV in South Africa is approached by authors like Nina Hunter (chapter 12) and to a lesser extent also the policies regarding the non-profit sector by Leila Patel (Chapter 13) as well as home-based care for elderly in Switzerland (chapter 14) is very closely related to a communal way of handling care, care policies and needs, and therewith to the Ubuntu philosophy.

In the fourth part of the book, questions of gender are refocussed from the perspective of narratives of care and applied through case studies focussing on gender as topic itself, like the chapter by Tamara Shefer (chapter 16) upon young people and the chapter on masculinity by Robert Morrell and Rachel Jewkes (chapter 17), or, on child care, motherhood, and families, as the remaining chapters, in which HIV in South African case studies on care shows to be urgent again.

The transnational approaches to care and gender taken in both books differ in a fruitful way, focusing on the situation of migrants in one and on different care systems in the other book, while nontheless, with regard to the analytical tools applied, similarities in both books are retrievable.