Paradoxes of citizenship and migrant domestic workers: the case of women working in Italy

1. Paradoxes of citizenship and migrant domestic workers: the case of women working in Italy Séminaire 1 REDTAC-(Im)migration/CÉRIUM Université de Montréal , le 15 mai 2009 Nouveaux enjeux d’(im)migration: droits, travail et développement Laura Stefanelli Candidate au doctorat en science politique, Université de Montréal CPDS, Centre sur les politiques et le développementsociale REDTAC-(IM)MIGRATION réseaud’études des dynamiquestransnationales et de l’action collective pôle de recherchesurl’Immigration

2. Plan • Context • Problem • Central question • Methodology • Conclusion

3. Context: the feminization of migration • Increasing of ageing population and life’s expectancy • Decreasing of the birth’s rate • Feminization of employment • Coming to maturity of expensive welfare systems

4. How to reconcile two opposite tensions? • 1. Retrenchment of resources and scarce public services for elderly • 2. Rising demand for expenditures on health and pensions

5. questions • 1. Who will take care of the elderly? • 2. Does the immigration lead to the redefinition of gender relations and highlight the multiple inequalities of class, race and ethnicity?

6. Why study the domestic sector? • Social reproductive labor is accomplished (Brenner and Laslett 1991) • Italian families find “alternative solutions” to cope with the health need of the elderly • Ethnic (and transnational) niche of work • = “care need”

7. Who is a domestic worker? • COLF is an acronym for family collaborator • BADANTE is the current expression for caregivers for dependents in private home. It comes from the verb “badare”, which means “to care”.

8. Gender relations • Importation of “femininity” to maintain the traditional household model of gender relations. (Lutz 1997) • “power asymmetries” based on ethnicized identities. • The migration of women transforms gender relations in highlighting gender, class and ethnical inequalities. • Hierarchies between native women and migrant women.

9. Methodology • Intersectional and feminist perspectives • Domestic space = co-presence of women • “substitution” of migrant women in caring and housekeeping transforms the roles between women and does not question the traditional household model. (Anderson 2000)

10. Methodology 2 • The intersectional perspective stresses the multilayered differences between women in the private sphere and it accents the ethnic segmentation of domestic job. • Lutz 2002 “the private sphere as a work place fits well for an intersectional analysis of social positioning and social space in which the categories of ethnicity, class, gender and nationality are combined”. • Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002 “the intersectional applied on the characteristics of female migratory experience highlights the fact that domestic work represents quite an exclusive job opportunity shaping the formation of gendered and ethnicized niches of migration”.

11. A gendered reading of citizenship (Yuval-Davis 1997) • Incorporation of the notion of difference between women. • It includes other dimensions of social divisions and social positioning, such as gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, stage in life etc. • Multilayered conception of citizenship operating on several frontiers. • = “differentiated citizenship”

12. Paradoxes of citizenship • The usage of citizenship as a nodal point of intersection of other social relations (class, gender, race inequalities). • “Partial citizens”: migrant women are low-wage paid and belong to the ethnicized niche of work. • Female migratory patterns are different from male migratory process. • Double belonging of migrants as “women” and as “partial citizen”.