“I Have to Take Care of My Body”: Health Imperatives in Migrant Women’s Self-Employment Practices

• In Event: Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Bodies & Health

Abstract

This paper examines how migrant women engaged in self-employment and microentrepreneurship navigate labor-market precarity through their bodies and health in the aftermath of migration. While self-employment is often framed as a pathway to flexibility or autonomy in contexts of labor-market marginalization, I argue that it simultaneously produces intensified forms of embodied discipline, where the ability to work becomes inseparable from maintaining a healthy, functional body.
Drawing on 30 biographical, in-depth interviews with migrant women in Québec, Canada, this study focuses on women who, despite holding significant educational credentials and professional experience, face systemic barriers to formal employment linked to credential recognition, linguistic discrimination and racialization. In response, many turn to self-employment and microentrepreneurship; forms of “autonomous” work that frequently rely heavily on high physical availability, minimal social protections, and the constant self-management of health, pain, and exhaustion.
Bridging feminist critiques of labor and health, this paper mobilizes the concept of perpetual work (Castro, 2016) to analyze how neoliberal labor arrangements demand an idealized, perpetually healthy worker. Engaging with feminist political economy (Weeks 2011), I conceptualize the body not only as an essential working tool that must be continuously maintained, optimized, and disciplined. Bodily maintenance - through diet, rest, avoiding injuries - emerges as an unpaid yet central dimension of labor.
The findings reveal how gendered and racialized expectations shape whose bodies are deemed reliable, productive, and expendable within contemporary labor markets. By foregrounding embodied labor in migrant women’s self-employment practices, this paper contributes to debates on work, embodiment, and migration, demonstrating how autonomy in work often reproduces systemic inequalities through intensified bodily demands.

Author

• Carolina Gallo Garcia, Saint Paul University