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The feminization of care migration in transnational contexts has received a great deal of attention. Scholars, however, have been slow to investigate a similar trend in intranational contexts. This article expands existing research on global care chains by examining the gendered emotional labor of migrant domestic workers pertaining to China’s intranational care chains. While the former often foregrounds “racial or ethnic discounting,” the latter is characterized by “citizenly discounting” whereby migrant domestic workers are subject to an overarching system of alienation, subordination, and exploitation owning to their second-class rural hùkŏu (household registration) status. Drawing on a participant-observation study of nannies, this article highlights how the intersection of gender and rural-urban citizenship is the key to grasping China’s migrant domestic workers’ experiences of extensive alienation at the nexus of work, family, and wider society. By delving into a particular set of political, economic, and cultural forces in the Chinese context, the article makes a distinctive contribution to a more nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of the interface of gender, emotional labor, and care migration.

In this study I highlight the spatial exclusions that migrant domestic workers (MDWs) experience in Lebanon. I argue that migrant domestic workers constantly challenge such spatial exclusions by using the exact spaces that they are excluded from as the bases for a meso-level of resistances—strategic acts that cannot be classified as either private and individual or as organized collective action. I highlight three kinds of such resistive activities: the strategic dyads forged across balconies by the most restricted live-in workers, the small collectives formed outside ethnic churches by other live-in workers, and much larger worker collectives (that often cross national borders) in rental apartments occupied by illegal freelancers and runaways. By analyzing these spaces as strategic instances of workers’ collectives, I question the portrayal of MDWs in the Arab world as ultimate and defeated victims of abuse. But the continuum of resistive activities undertaken by MDWs in Lebanon also challenges the dichotomies often constructed between public (overt and organized) and private (individual and symbolic) forms of organization and resistances. This meso-level of resistance becomes particularly significant in a country like Lebanon, where MDWs are forbidden from forming or joining formal unions, and becomes critical for workers from many countries in Africa and South Asia who, unlike the larger Filipina community, have little access to formal support systems like consulates and embassies.

Based on anthropological fieldwork in Yemen, this article examines the relationship between gender, mobility, and il/legality in the lives of Ethiopian domestic workers. Studies about migrant domestic workers in the Middle East often focus on abuse and exploitation, making a plea for the regulation of women’s legal status. Yet legal migration does not automatically mean that women gain more rights and become more mobile; regulation may also entail more control. The relationship between method of entry and legal status is not fixed, and the boundaries between legality and illegality are often blurred, with women moving in and out of il/legality and legal organizations following illegal practices, and vice versa. Gendered state policies and practices also affect women’s space for maneuvering, and attempts at regulation may further restrict rather than increase their mobility.

This article examines the complexity of feminized domestic labor in the context of global migration. I view unpaid household labor and paid domestic work not as dichotomous categories but as structural continuities across the public and private spheres. Based on a qualitative study of Filipina migrant domestic workers in Taiwan, I demonstrate how women travel through the maid/madam boundary—housewives in home countries become breadwinners by doing domestic work overseas, and foreign maids turn into foreign brides. While migrant women sell their domestic labor in the market, they remain burdened with gendered responsibilities in their own families. Their simultaneous occupancy of paid and unpaid domestic labor is segmented into distinct spatial settings. I underscore women’s agency by presenting how they articulate their paid and unpaid domestic labor and bargain with the monetary and emotional value of their labor.

This article examines the politics of reproductive labor in globalization. Using the case of migrant Filipina domestic workers, the author presents the formation of a three-tier transfer of reproductive labor in globalization between the following groups of women: (1) middle-class women in receiving nations, (2) migrant domestic workers, and (3) Third World women who are too poor to migrate. The formation of this international division of labor suggests that reproduction activities, as they have been increasingly commodified, have to be situated in the context of the global market economy. This division of labor is a structural process that determines the migration of Filipina domestic workers. As such, this article also uses in-depth interviews to examine and enumerate the contradictions that migrant Filipina domestic workers experience in their family and work lives as a result of “being in the middle” of this division of labor.