The Boundaries of Care: The Construction of Social Invisible Labor in a Time of Crisis

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17: Careers, Work, and Family

Abstract

This study examines how Israeli teacher-mothers embodied invisible social labor during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a public elementary school, we employed a multi-source methodology that included 15 in-depth interviews, seven ethnographic observations, and analysis of 22 organizational and public texts. We define invisible social labor as gendered work that is publicly essential, morally demanded, and structurally unsupported, emerging at the intersection of professional duty, maternal identity, and national crisis. Using a Foucauldian lens, we develop a four-level model (individual, organizational, public, institutional) to trace how disciplinary and subjectifying forces operated recursively to naturalize teachermothers' self-sacrifice. Our findings reveal how their labor was expanded, naturalized, and rendered invisible within a collapsing infrastructure, while their professional and maternal identities were fused into a caregiving role. This framework offers a situated, power sensitive account of how feminized public professions are moralized into invisibility in times of institutional collapse.

Authors

• Yael Ben-David, New York University

• Maya Adar, Reichman University