At the Border of Love & Labor: Rethinking the Work of Care
In both the US and Sweden critical analysis of the global traffic of domestic workers has been rightly focused on draconic immigration laws. After all, this care drain has yielded staggering numbers of partial citizens. An intersecting set of borders — as entrenched as any national ones — have received less attention, however, those restricting our understanding of the content and terms of affective labor and the relationship of this work to collectivities designated as “families.” Despite the proliferation of dual earning, care sharing progressive networks of nonbiological kin, traditional views of domesticity and the gendered separation of spheres remain remarkably resilient. As a result, conceptions of the boundaries and responsibilities of families remain inadequate in at least two important respects. First, we still think of families as private, autonomous households (although membership has always been fluidly defined). Second, we continue to devalue and gender family welfare work presuming it is and should remain unpaid, a “labor of love.” Employing the tools of feminist critical theory, in this workshop we will begin transgressing these conceptual borders by examing the work of care and other forms of affective labor.
