What is it like to care for another family, while yours remains in a different country? In today’s capitalist society, migrant women performing care work in private households experience the painful tension of caring for both, often under precarious conditions.
Characterised as the ‘backstage’ family, the carer’s remote relationship with their loved ones at home is often purely digital, with the double dilemmas of migrant motherhood and stay-behind fathers – exposing the pitfalls of transnational employment relations and the growth of social inequality.
Here, Helma Lutz explores the debates around this issue, focusing on carers from Eastern Europe working in the West. She unpacks questions around feminist critiques of capitalism and the commodification of emotional labour, exploring how gender justice and the search for socialist feminist utopias can shape how we see a future – not only for the improvement of the carers’ working and living conditions but also for a new way of dealing with care work.
Table of Content
Foreword
1. Uncaring Care-Economies
2. On the Road: The Supply Chain of Care Workers Between Germany and Central and East European Countries
3. Distance and proximity: Transnational mothering and emotional inequality
4. Euro-orphans: Transnational Motherhood Under Pressure
5. Masculinity and Care in Post-Socialism: The Fatherhood of Stay-Behind Partners
6. From Socialist Utopia to the Global Commercialization of Care: New Answers to an Old Question
7. The Care Economy after COVID19: Vulnerability and Resilience
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
About the author
Helma Lutz is a sociologist and Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. For many years she was the Acting Director of the Cornelia Goethe Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the author of The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy; the co-editor with Kathy Davis of The Routledge International Handbook of Intersectionality Studies and with Brigitte Aulenbacher, Ewa Palenga-Möllenbeck and Karin Schwiter the co-editor of Home Care for Sale: The Transnational Brokering of Senior Care in Europe. She lives in Amsterdam.
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