Global domestic workers: intersectional inequalities and struggles for rights

Drawing from the EU-funded DomEQUAL research project across 9 countries in Europe, South America and Asia, this comparative study explores the conditions of domestic workers around the world and the campaigns they are conducting to improve their labour rights. The book showcases how domestic workers’ movements put ‘intersectionality in action’ in representing the interest of various marginalized social groups from migrants and low-income groups to racialized and rural girls and women. Casting light on issues such as subjectification, and collective organizing on the part of a category of workers conventionally regarded as unorganizable, this ambitious volume will be invaluable for scholars, policy makers and activists alike

The feminist and domestic workers’ movements: disconnected practices, discursive convergences

The article explores the relationship between women’s rights and feminist and domestic workers’ movements by drawing on qualitative data gathered in a comparative study on domestic workers’rights in Italy, Germany, Spain, India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador (2016–21). Despite the frequent disconnection between the two movements at the practical level, a possible convergence may be identified in the discursive frames that domestic workers’ rights activists make use of. The analysis focuses on two feminist anti-capitalist frames recurring in mobilisations for domestic workers’ rights, addressing the valorisation of reproductive labour and the transnational commodification of care. Domestic workers’ activism tends to build on these frames beyond their mainstream forms and to expand them in intersectional ways, enlarging their capacity to include racialised, low-class, migrant and other minority groups. This becomes a creative force at the level of discourse, where different alliances may take place in a less visible way.The article explores the relationship between women’s rights and feminist and domestic workers’ movements by drawing on qualitative data gathered in a comparative study on domestic workers’ rights in Italy, Germany, Spain, India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador (2016–21). Despite the frequent disconnection between the two movements at the practical level, a possible convergence may be identified in the discursive frames that domestic workers’ rights activists make use of. The analysis focuses on two feminist anti-capitalist frames recurring in mobilisations for domestic workers’ rights, addressing the valorisation of reproductive labour and the transnational commodification of care. Domestic workers’ activism tends to build on these frames beyond their mainstream forms and to expand them in intersectional ways, enlarging their capacity to include racialised, low-class, migrant and other minority groups. This becomes a creative force at the level of discourse, where different alliances may take place in a less visible way

Intersectional Politics on Domestic Workers' Rights. The Cases of Ecuador and Colombia

The chapter looks at domestic workers’ movements as a telling case of collective action developed by multiply-marginalised social groups, in particular migrant, low-class, racialised, and rural women employed in the sector. The present study focuses on Ecuador and Colombia, exploring the ways in which organisations in both contexts used intersectionality differently, in various aspects of their mobilisation process, in the period between 2010 and 2018. Interestingly, activists in Ecuador appear to develop a complex discourse that articulates the role that gender and class, in addition to race, play in the inequalities that weigh on domestic workers, and yet when they lobby their government to ratify the ILO ‘Convention No. 189 on decent work for domestic workers,’ they privilege alliances based on class and the promotion of labour rights. On the contrary, in Colombia, activists are able to use their intersectional identities, as Afro-Colombian women domestic workers, to bring into the public sphere a discourse in which gender, race, and class are always present, and they do so by originally articulating a new frame rooted in a feminist analysis of the ‘care economy.

Chapter 12 Intersectional politics on domestic workers’ rights

Examining the ways in which feminist and queer activists confront privilege through the use of intersectionality, this edited collection presents empirical case studies from around the world to consider how intersectionality has been taken up (or indeed contested) by activists in order to expose and resist privilege.The volume sets out three key ways in which intersectionality operates within feminist and queer movements: it is used as a collective identity, as a strategy for forming coalitions, and as a repertoire for inclusivity. The case studies presented in this book then evaluate the extent to which some, or all, of these types of intersectional activism are used to confront manifestations of privilege. Drawing upon a wide range of cases from across time and space, this volume explores the difficulties with which activists often grapple when it comes to translating the desire for intersectionality into a praxis which confronts privilege. Addressing inter-related and politically relevant questions concerning how we apply and theorise intersectionality in our studies of feminist and queer movements, this timely edited collection will be of interest to students and scholars from across the social sciences and humanities with an interest in gender and feminism, LGBT+ and queer studies, and social movement studies

L’intersezionalità come pratica politica nei movimenti di lavoratrici domestiche

The article looks at domestic workers’ rights organisations as an interesting case of social movements including intersectionality into their political practice, in other words doing what we call ‘intersectionality in action’. The article draws on in-depth interviews gathered in a comparative study on domestic workers’ rights in Italy, Germany, Spain, India, Philippines, Taiwan, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador (2016–21). Across these diverse contexts, domestic workers’ groups face the com- mon challenge of organising a multiply marginalised workforce typically consti- tuted by women belonging to low-class, low-caste, racialised, and migrant groups. The intersectionality of the labour force composition is reflected in different ways at the level of collective identity making, of claims and actions, as well as at the level of the discursive frames mobilised to promote their rights. The activist do- mestic workers included in our study show similarly creative ways to deal with these challenges and take into account intersectional inequalities in their political practice, and they do so primarily in creating independent organisations, autono- mous collective identities, and processes of re-appropriation of feminist frames

Normas y valores de los jóvenes en el Mediterráneo árabe: un análisis de género

This article reflects on the changes and continuities in the cultural values and norms of young men and women with regard to gender relations and roles in five Arab Mediterranean countries: Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Tunisia and Egypt. To do this, attention is given to the processes and practices of cultural innovation that have arisen among the region’s generations of young people since the 2011 uprisings. The empirical analysis is based on qualitative and quantitative data gathered through the multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and international survey of the SAHWA research project. The analysis reveals young people who are social actors able to confront structural limitations and mechanisms of exclusion; at the same time, it describes the distinct way young men and women in the region inhabit the ambivalent condition of “waithood"