Socialities and Gender in Care. Domestic Migration in India

Abstract

How do processes of migration affect and get shaped by the apparently inescapable gendering of care work across the many differences and hierarchies among women in diverse contexts? How can we map the patterns of migration, gender, and paid work with the relations and mutualities of being necessary and desired in care? Much of the discussion on gender, care, and migration has focussed on international female migrant care workers. The large numbers of domestic migrants and the variety of their work is barely acknowledged in this literature. The literature on domestic migration has also tended not to account for the complexity of gender and labour of people on the move. This paper examines the reworkings of the nexus of gender and care within three streams of domestic migration in India, drawing largely on a wide range of ethnographic studies. They are viewed in terms of movements in and out and through networks of social relations, where care relations are built anew in and through their spatial movements.