Agents of Empirehighlights the aims and methods behind the emigrators' work, as well as the implications and ramifications of their long-term engagement with this imperialistic feminizing project.
This timely and innovative book analyses the lives of new female migrants in the EU with a focus on the labour market, domestic work, care work and prostitution in particular. It provides a ...comparative analysis embracing eleven European countries from Northern (UK, Germany, Sweden, France), Southern (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus) and Eastern Europe (Poland, Slovenia), i.e. old and new immigration countries as well as old and new market economies. It maps labour market trends, welfare policies, migration laws, patterns of employment, and the working and social conditions of female migrants in different sectors of the labour market, formal and informal. It is particularly concerned with the strategies women use to counter the disadvantages they face. It analyses the ways in which gender hierarchies are intertwined with other social relations of power, providing a gendered and intersectional perspective, drawing on the biographies of migrant women. The book highlights policy relevant issues and tries to uncover some of the contradictory assumptions relating to integration which it treats as a highly normative and problematic concept. It reframes integration in terms of greater equalisation and democratisation (entailed in the parameters of access, participation and belonging), pointing to its transnational and intersectional dimensions.
Resurgent immigration is one of the most powerful forces disrupting and realigning everyday life in the United States and elsewhere, and gender is one of the fundamental social categories anchoring ...and shaping immigration patterns. Yet the intersection of gender and immigration has received little attention in contemporary social science literature and immigration research. This book brings together some of the best work in this area, including essays by pioneers who have logged nearly two decades in the field of gender and immigration, and new empirical work by both young scholars and well-established social scientists bringing their substantial talents to this topic for the first time.
The managed hand Kang, Miliann
2010., 20100502, 2010, 2010-06-02
eBook
Two women, virtual strangers, sit hand-in-hand across a narrow table, both intent on the same thing-achieving the perfect manicure. Encounters like this occur thousands of times across the United ...States in nail salons increasingly owned and operated by Asian immigrants. This study looks closely for the first time at these intimate encounters, focusing on New York City, where such nail salons have become ubiquitous. Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure-from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, The Managed Hand finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.
American Muslim Women Karim, Jamillah
2009, 2008, 2008-12-01, 20090101, Letnik:
10
eBook
African American Muslims and South Asian Muslim immigrants are two of the largest ethnic Muslim groups in the U.S. Yet there are few sites in which African Americans and South Asian immigrants come ...together, and South Asians are often held up as a model minority against African Americans. However, the American ummah, or American Muslim community, stands as a unique site for interethnic solidarity in a time of increased tensions between native-born Americans and immigrants.
This ethnographic study of African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims in Chicago and Atlanta explores how Islamic ideals of racial harmony and equality create hopeful possibilities in an American society that remains challenged by race and class inequalities. The volume focuses on women who, due to gender inequalities, are sometimes more likely to move outside of their ethnic Muslim spaces and interact with other Muslim ethnic groups in search of gender justice.
American Muslim Women explores the relationships and sometimes alliances between African Americans and South Asian immigrants, drawing on interviews with a diverse group of women from these two communities. Karim investigates what it means to negotiate religious sisterhood against America's race and class hierarchies, and how those in the American Muslim community both construct and cross ethnic boundaries.
American Muslim Women reveals the ways in which multiple forms of identity frame the American Muslim experience, in some moments reinforcing ethnic boundaries, and at other times, resisting them.
Domestic and care work in private households is now the largest employment sector for migrant women. This book sheds light on these households through its focus on the interpersonal relationships ...between Latin American “undocumented migrant” domestic workers and employers in Austria, Germany, Spain and the UK. The personal experiences of these women form the basis for Gutiérrez-Rodríguez’s decolonial analysis of the feminization of labor in private households and cultural analysis of domestic work as affective labor. This book will be a necessary voice in the debates on citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and migrant workers’ rights.
Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez is Senior Lecturer in Transcultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.
Introduction: Sensing Domestic Work 1. Decolonizing Migration Studies: On Transcultural Translation 2. Coloniality of Labor: Migration Regimes and the Latin American Diaspora in Europe 3. Governing the Household: On the Underside of Governmentality 4. Biopolitics and Value: Complicating the Feminization of Labor 5. Symbolic Power and Difference: Racializing Inequality 6. Affective Value: Ontologies of Exploitation 7. Decolonial Ethics and the Politics of Affects: Talking Rights
"This book draws on rich empirical studies of domestic workers and their employers in four European countries to make a convincing argument that domestic work is affective labour that is both structured by and transcends the logic of rights. It introduces the reader to migrants and their employers to reveal the emotional and relational complexity within private households. Its insights and decolonial perspective shed new light on the struggles of migrant domestic workers, and what is at stake for both workers and employers."
- Dr. Bridget Anderson, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford, UK
"Using her own positioning as a child of guest workers as a starting point, Gutierrez-Rodriguez explores the precarious work lives and struggles for rights and respect of Latin American women employed as domestic workers in Europe. Her theorization of affective relations between housewives and domestic workers and the continuing coloniality of power within transculturation and translation processes make this book a pathbreaking contribution to migration research, and feminist studies."
- Nina Glick Schiller, Director Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Culture and Professor of Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK
‘This book will be useful to those engaged in the theory of sociological analysis and to historians of American communism.’
-Grover C. Furr, Monclair State University, USA
Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia,
could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico,
Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and
the ...incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter's
health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia
discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an
immigration status-it would be a way of living, of mothering, and
of being discarded by even those institutions we count on to
care.
Elizabeth Farfán-Santos spent five years with Claudia. As she
listened to Claudia's experiences, she recalled her own mother's
story, another life molded by migration, the US-Mexico border, and
the quest for a healthy future on either side. Witnessing Claudia's
struggles with doctors and teachers, we see how the education and
medical systems enforce undocumented status and perpetuate
disability. At one point, in the midst of advocating for her
daughter, Claudia suddenly finds herself struck by debilitating
pain. Claudia is lifted up by her comadres, sent to the doctor, and
reminded why she must care for herself.
A braided narrative that speaks to the power of stories for
creating connection, this book reveals what remains undocumented in
the motherhood of Mexican women who find themselves making
impossible decisions and multiple sacrifices as they build a future
for their families.
Immigration and Women Pearce, Susan; Clifford, Elizabeth; Tandon, Reena
05/2011
eBook
The popular debate around contemporary U.S. immigration tends to conjure images of men waiting on the side of the road for construction jobs, working in kitchens or delis, driving taxis, and sending ...money to their wives and families in their home countries, while women are often left out of these pictures. Immigration and Women is a national portrait of immigrant women who live in the United States today, featuring the voices of these women as they describe their contributions to work, culture, and activism.Through an examination of U.S. Census data and interviews with women across nationalities, we hear the poignant, humorous, hopeful, and defiant words of these women as they describe the often confusing terrain where they are starting new lives, creating architecture firms, building urban high-rises, caring for children, cleaning offices, producing creative works, and organizing for social change. Highlighting the gendered quality of the immigration process, Immigration and Women interrogates how human agency and societal structures interact within the intersecting social locations of gender and migration. The authors recommend changes for public policy to address the constraints these women face, insisting that new policy must be attentive to the diverse profile of today's immigrating woman: she is both potentially vulnerable to exploitative conditions and forging new avenues of societal leadership.
Since the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, nearly 100,000 Korean women have immigrated to the United States as the wives of American soldiers. Based on extensive oral interviews and archival ...research, Beyond the Shadow of the Camptowns tells the stories of these women, from their presumed association with U.S. military camptowns and prostitution to their struggles within the intercultural families they create in the United States.
Historian Ji-Yeon Yuh argues that military brides are a unique prism through which to view cultural and social contact between Korea and the U.S. After placing these women within the context of Korean-U.S. relations and the legacies of both Japanese and U.S. colonialism vis á vis military prostitution, Yuh goes on to explore their lives, their coping strategies with their new families, and their relationships with their Korean families and homeland. Topics range from the personal—the role of food in their lives—to the communal the efforts of military wives to form support groups that enable them to affirm Korean identity that both American and Koreans would deny them.
Relayed with warmth and compassion, this is the first in-depth study of Korean military brides, and is a groundbreaking contribution to Asian American, women's, and new immigrant studies, while also providing a unique approach to military history.
