Decolonizing Reproductive Labor: Caribbean Women, Migration, and Domestic Work in the Global Economy
Decolonizing Reproductive Labor: Caribbean Women, Migration, and Domestic Work in the Global Economy by Charmaine Crawford
Abstract
In this paper, I focus on the experiences of working-class African-Caribbean women who migrated to Canada in the late twentieth century in search of better economic opportunities for themselves and their families. Female migrants initially entered Canada on a temporary basis to work and later decided on permanent settlement. They had similar experiences of working in domestic services while securing their residency status and supporting their children from abroad. I utilize feminist qualitative methodology incorporating semi-structured interviews conducted on ten female migrants who share their experiences of migration, domestic work and motherhood. I interrogate how domestic work in the global economy is informed by intersectional inequalities along gender, race, class, and citizenship lines that not only contribute to the devaluation of paid reproductive labor, in particular, but also reinforce asymmetries between working-class African-Caribbean women and their white female employers in relation to work and family. I investigate 1) how the racialization of reproductive work under colonialism has contributed to the devaluation of black women's labor in paid domestic work at the present time; 2) the relationship between migration and stratified reproduction as experienced by Caribbean domestics in Canada in the late twentieth century; and 3) how Caribbean domestics negotiate the ambiguities of care work with their employers. Overall, I argue that the issue of paid domestic not only raises several questions about an unequal gender division of labor vis-à-vis so-called women's work and men's work, the under-remuneration of domestic labor, and the devaluation of care work, but it also exposes the stratified class and race dynamics in reproductive work (both paid and unpaid) among different groups of women in the global economy.
Journal Information
The Global South is an interdisciplinary journal that focuses on how world literatures and cultures respond to globalization, particularly how authors, writers, and critics respond to issues of the environment, poverty, immigration, gender, race, hybridity, cultural formation and transformation, colonialism and postcolonialism, modernity and postmodernity, transatlantic encounters, homes, and diasporas, and resistance and counter discourse, among others, under the superordinate umbrella of globalization. The Global South is distributed only electronically. Single print issues are available on demand by contacting IU Press customer service.
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