Chain of care describes highly gendered, racialized and heteronormative expectations for caregivers and their behaviors towards their clients. Carework entails emotional labour work defined as including but not limited to elder care, childcare/nannying, sex work, beauticians, estheticians, and more. The chain of care has particular expectations of normative care-workers, especially gentle, heterosexual, maternalistic femininity aspiring for qualities associated with white femininity but often assigned to primarily women of colour, especially Filipino women and South Asian women. While these gendered, racialized, and heteronormative expectations are invisibilized, they create enormous strains on careworkers to embody characteristics that may not resemble the careworkers themselves. Manalansan (2008) writes on queering the chain of care through analyses of Filipino queer men and transwomen and their emotional care-labour to Israeli elderly men. These queer, racialized genders defy normative expectations of what careworkers look like, but they do the work nonetheless. Chain of care can also be considered the woman of colour’s burden for the white women’s so-called liberation; while white Western women increasingly participate in out-of-house careers and job opportunities, migrant women of colour are demanded to abandon their families and homelands to take on the care of white families and homes.
Considering the chain of care as a social justice issue is relevant for its especially straining expectations and demands of particular genders, sexualities, and race-ethnicities. While the typical careworker might be envisioned as white and thin Scarlett Johansson (Pulcini, Springer Berman, 2007), for real-life careworkers to be placed against this fictional standard is an unrealistic, unattainable, and undervalued stress to take on. Additionally, as Manalansan points out, these expectations of careworkers isolated and silence the voices of non-normative/queered embodiments of care workers, such as the queer men and transwomen that Manalansan studies. By being deviant from these femininity standards, careworkers are often subjected to particular marginalization and a disempowerment to their agencies for equity, fair labour standards, and representation.
Academic Sources:
Manalansan, M. F. (2008). Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm. The Scholar and Feminist
Online,6(3), 1-5. Retrieved March, 2019, from http://sfonline.barnard.edu/immigration/manalansan_01.htm
Pulcini, R., & Springer Berman, S. (Directors). (2007). Nanny Diaries[Motion picture]. United
States of America: FilmColony.
Keywords: emotional labour, migrant justice, queering, feminism, care labour Author: DjangoJane
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