Residential and Daily Mobilities of Domestic Workers: Spatial Effects of Class, Gender, and Administrative Precarity

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 14: Urban Mobility and Migration

Abstract

Drawing on a qualitative study based on 43 biographical interviews with care workers in the Paris metropolitan area, this article examines the extent to which subsistence work is shaped by residential mobility and, in turn, how it structures everyday mobility. By focusing on paid domestic work and mobilizing a theoretical framework at the intersection of urban sociology and materialist feminism, this research sheds light on the role of the articulation of gender, class and race in shaping these women’s positions within the city. I explore the relationship between the care workers housing conditions, the spatial organization of domestic work in metropolitan areas, the mobilities they experience across the city for work, and their ability to make a decent living. The analysis foregrounds the spatial dimensions of inequalities in access to housing and decent work, demonstrating that these inequalities constitute an interconnected system in which instability in one domain generates instability in the other. These inequalities disproportionately affect racialized working-class women in metropolitan contexts compared to the general population, while the group of domestic workers is also marked by significant internal stratifications. The findings presented in this paper demonstrate a strong relationship between women’s ability to subsist and achieve autonomy through work and their residential conditions within the metropolitan context.

Author

• Lilite Rossignol, Gustave Eiffel University