“We’re Like Parents and Children”: Triangulated Care Relationships Between Children and Migrant Domestic Workers

• In Event: 3523 - Family Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 2: Family Relationships

Abstract

Persistent economic inequality between men and women, combined with differences in gender expectations and a growing inequality among women globally, has resulted in families ‘outsourcing’ domestic and emotional labor tasks by employing foreign domestic workers. In this type of private childcare arrangement, middle-to-high-class families are juxtaposed and stratified alongside lower-class individuals (often women from the Global South) into single familial units. Within this intimate, cross-cultural care-arrangement, ‘family’ has become a constant site of negotiation and reinterpretation, both for those who hand-over and provide care (i.e. parent-employers and domestic workers), as well as for those who receive it (i.e. children). The voices of the latter group have seldom received attention in the literature. Drawing on in-depth interviews with young people who grew up with domestic workers, alongside interviews with domestic workers themselves, this study explores the inter-relational care processes in private households in Hong Kong. It demonstrates that commodified care from a domestic worker can develop, through a process of mutual negotiation, into intimate love-laboring relationships that, in turn, reflect larger dynamics of familial transformation which are endemic to ‘global cities.’

Author

• Iris Hoiting, University of Hong Kong