Care Work in Transition: Transnational Circuits of Gender, Migration, and Care:

This article presents a broad overview of the emerging field of scholarship on gender, migration and care work. The first section provides a rationale for linking the embodied intimate labor of sex workers and surrogate mothers to more traditional caregiving among nannies, nurses and eldercare aids. Through an intersectional optic on power and domination in care workers’ everyday lives, we highlight the ways in which love’s labor is lost and devalued in the sphere of the home as workplace, the family and community as employer, the state as labor recruiter, and the labor market as a site of ethnic boundaries and exclusions. Distinguishing different types of care and its institutional and geographic location matters in explaining current care in transition. Care work, in many domains, has become appropriated by markets. We consider how political, institutional, and cultural factors have shaped, and are reshaping, the ideas and norms of care in the context of transnational care worker migration. Too often, s...