Int J Polit Cult Soc

DOI 10.1007/s10767-013-9154-7

The Precarity of Feminisation

On Domestic Work, Heteronormativity and the Coloniality
of Labour

Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract Despite women’s increasing participation in the labour market and attempts to transform
the traditional gendered division of work, domestic and care work is still perceived as women’s
terrain. This work continues to be invisible in terms of the organisation of production or productive
value and domestic and care work continues to be unpaid or low paid. Taking domestic and care
work as an expression of the feminisation of labour, this article will attempt to complicate this
analysis by first exploring a queer critique of feminisation, and second, by situating feminisation
within the context of the coloniality of power. Drawing on research conducted in Austria, Germany,
Spain and the UK on the organisation of domestic work in private households, the article will
conclude with some observations on the interconnectedness of feminisation, heteronormativity and
the coloniality of power in the analysis of the expansion of precarity in the EU zone.

Keywords Feminisation . Heteronormativity . Coloniality . Precarity . Europe

Introduction

The representation of heterosexual nuclear families as sites of care and love, detached from
any kind of labour, erases the work that goes into keeping households and society going.
Despite women’s increasing participation in the labour market and attempts to transform the
traditional gendered division of work, domestic and care work is still perceived as women’s
terrain. This work continues to be largely invisible in terms of the organisation of production
or productive value (Hewitson 1999; Himmelweit 1995; Pérez Orozco 2010; Waring 1999)
and domestic and care work continues to be unpaid or low paid (Folbre 1982, 1991; Fox
1980). The devaluation of domestic and care work is the result of its social perception as
“feminised” labour (cf. Bair 2010; Bakker 2007; Elson 1998).
As several authors have argued (Barker 2005; Benería 1992; Boserup 1970; Hartmann 1979;
Peterson 2009; Standing 1999), feminisation equates to the devaluation of work in sectors in which
women are over-represented (Bair 2010; Bakker 2007; Elson 1998; Mohanty 1991; Ong 1987;
Phizacklea and Wolkowitz 1995). Further, feminisation also refers to the increasing incorporation of

E. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez (*)
Institute of Sociology, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Karl-Glöckner-Str. 21E, 35394 Gießen,
Germany
e-mail: e.gutierrez-rodriguez@sowi.uni-giessen.de
 Gutiérrez-Rodríguez

skills and capabilities traditionally associated with women as carers (Beck-Gernsheim 1981; Beck-
Gernsheim and Ostner 1978; Hausen 2000; Ostner 1990; Sconvegno et al. 2007). Feminists have
long argued that feminised labour is low paid with poor working conditions and that “precarity”
shares much in common with the feminisation of labour (Corsani 2007; Fantone 2007; Federici
2006; Precarias a la Deriva 2004; Ruido 2011; Sconvegno et al. 2007). That is, there has been an
expansion of temporary work coupled with a cheapening and flexibilisation of the workforce.
This article will take up this argument by first considering a queer critique of feminisation,
and second, by situating feminisation within the context of the coloniality of power (Quijano
2000, 2008). Drawing on research conducted in Austria, Germany, the UK and Spain on the
organisation of domestic work in private households (Caixeta et al. 2004; Gutiérrez Rodríguez
2010),1 I will argue for a complication of the concept of feminisation. The article concludes
with some observations on the interconnectedness of feminisation, heteronormativity, and the
coloniality of power in the analysis of the expansion of precarity in the European Union (EU).
Let us now move on to queering feminisation.

Queering Feminisation

Despite the feminist struggle for gender equality, very little has changed since the 1970s and
1980s when women’s movements highlighted the devaluation of women’s work (cf. Barrett
1980; Dalla Costa and James 1972; Delphy and Leonard 1984; Bock and Duden 1977;
Duden 2009; Friedan 2013; Mitchell 1971). The contribution of domestic work continues to
be ignored in national gross domestic products (GDPs) (cf. Ferber and Nelson 1993; Folbre
1994; Himmelweit 1995; Hewitson 1999; Pérez Orozco 2004; Waring 1999). Thus, domes-
tic work is still perceived as unproductive and unskilled labour, lacking any productive value
(Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010; Weeks 2011).
Feminists counter this perception by insisting on its constitutive value for societal reproduc-
tion (Bakker and Gill 2003; Barker and Feiner 2010; Bedford and Rai 2010; Benería 1979;
Dalla Costa and James 1972; Federici 2004; Hartmann 1979; Himmelweit 1995; Kofman 2012;
Molyneux 1979; Pérez Orozco 2010; Peterson 2009; Waring 2004). They also emphasise the
productive character of feminised labour as emotional labour, since domestic work comprises
personal care skills (cf. Boris and Parreñas 2010; Carrington 1999; Hochschild 1983, 2003; Lan
2006), and interrogate the Marxist conceptualization of reproductive and productive labour (cf.
O’Hara 1998; Jacobs 2010; Redclift 1985). European Mediterranean feminists have rejoined
the debate on feminisation by critiquing the divide between reproductive and productive labour
(Corsani 2007; Fantone 2007; Federici 2006; Precarias a la Deriva 2004; Ruido 2011;
Sconvegno et al. 2007; Vega Solís 2009), which is reflected in Precarias a la Deriva’s (2004)
concept of trabajo de cuidados (care work), which rather than reinforcing the divide between
productive and reproductive labour stresses that production and reproduction are both parts of a
continuum.
These approaches assert that the employment of a woman to deliver domestic and care
work represents a foundational link in the recreation of a patriarchal structure in which

1
This research draws on an EU project on the interpersonal relation between domestic workers and their
employers in private households conducted in Austria, Germany, Spain and the UK between 2003 and 2004.
Twenty-five in-depth interviews and ten focus groups were held in each country with domestic workers from
Eastern Europe, West Africa and Latin America, and with middle-aged, professional national White women
who employed a domestic worker (Caixeta et al. 2004, Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010, Tate and Vega Solís 2009).
The author also conducted further research in Germany, Spain and the UK between 2009 and 2011.
The Precarity of Feminisation

femininity is correlated with “household” and “care”. Discussions of domestic work as a form
of devalued labour (cf. Anderson 2000; Benería 1979; Dalla Costa and James 1972; Delphy and
Leonard 1984; Fox 1980; Molyneux 1979) have led to international debates on multiple and
simultaneous oppressions (Combahee River Collective 1983 (orig. 1977); Chaney and Garcia
Castro 1993; Davis 1981; Mohanty 2003; Phizacklea and Wolkowitz 1995; Rollins 1985;
Romero 1992), global inequalities, social reproduction and care-chains (Bakker and Gill 2003;
Benería 1979; Constable 1997; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Lan
2006; Molyneux 1979; Parreñas 2001), and the feminisation of the international economy
(Bedford and Rai 2010; Barker and Feiner 2010; Peterson 2003).
A critique of the heteronormative assumptions underlying debates on feminisation has been
formulated on the margins of feminist debates (cf. Badgett and Hyman 1998; Barker 2012;
Bedford and Rai 2010; Caixeta et al. 2004; Carrington 1999; Lind and Share 2003; Manalansan
2006; Peterson 2003; Rubin 1975). Drawing on debates on the normative heterosexual system
organising social relations, practices and institutions (cf. Berlant and Warner 1998; Klesse
2007; Rubin 1975), this scholarship addressed the connections between markets and sexual-
ities, capitalism and intimacy (Hennessy 2000; Kempadoo 2004; Rebhun 1999), work and
sexuality (Adkins 2000; Barker 2012; Bergeron and Puri 2012; Engel 2009; Lorenz and Kuster
2007; McDowell 1997; Ruido 2011). However, the analysis of the heteronormative logic
organising domestic work needs further consideration. Although critical migration studies
working on sexuality have critiqued the predominant use of the heterosexual reproduction
model as the primary mode of analysis of gender relations (Luibheid 2005; Manalansan 2006),
“the heteronormative framing of the economy and the policy landscape that are posed from
queer perspectives […] extend[s] beyond a need to sexualize social reproduction debates”
(Bedford and Rai 2010, p. 10).
Studies on queer families show that the negotiations around femininity and masculinity
are not always suspended. Therefore, although these kinship models might challenge the
heteronormative dynamics in private households (cf. Gabb 1999; Oerton 1997; Ryan-Flood
2009), the gendered division of work in private households extends beyond individual
negotiations due to the premises set by state policies.

Heteronormativity, the Private Household and State Policies

The organisation of domestic work in private households reveals the interrelationship between
different systems of domination and the embedding of domestic work in global inequalities.
Feminist scholarship insists that the private household is a microcosm of a wider societal structure
as it articulates the intersections between state and subject, labour and the market in private,
intimate relations (Gibson-Graham 2006; Peterson 2003). An analysis of the logic underpinning
the organisation of domestic work in private households enables us to capture the different levels
of governance within the private sphere (Williams 1995). Thus, taking the private household as a
unit of analysis of the social enables us to unpack processes of feminisation.
Public policies, particularly, family policies, continue to reinscribe traditional models of
femininity through prioritising the heterosexual nuclear family. In times of austerity in Western
Europe, it is to be expected that this model will be reinforced. As cuts in public spending in
Spain, Greece and the UK demonstrate (Colectivo Ioé 2012; European Women’s Lobby 2012),
these policies mainly affect poor households, and particularly, female-headed households. Cuts
in child care, social care and disability benefits re-interpellate women as the main providers of
care and domestic work. Poor and working class households manage this situation by relying on
their female family members, friends and neighbours. More affluent households continue to opt
 Gutiérrez-Rodríguez

to employ a person to support them (Anderson 2000; Caixeta et al. 2004; Gutiérrez Rodríguez
2010). However, as private household incomes are reduced, for example, in Spain, by an
average of 18.4 % (Público 2012), employing a domestic worker is only an option if the pay and
contract are renegotiated. Indeed, some private households have decreased salaries and
renegotiated insurance and social benefits, or employed a domestic worker on an irregular basis.
Further, if we take a closer look at “work–life balance” programmes in the EU (Caixeta et al.
2004), we can perceive an orientation towards the heterosexual family and a reinscription of
feminised subjects as “mothers” and “housewives” (cf. Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010). Among the
measures proposed to combine family and professional life, the EU focuses on the framework
agreement on parental leave by strengthening the rights of workers to such leave and demand-
ing a longer leave period. Though these initiatives are aimed at supporting gender equality and
are discussed on a national level, very few fathers are able to make use of this as comparative
research in the EU region demonstrates (TNS Political & Social 2012; TUC report 2013). The
gender pay gap and a pervasive ideology of motherhood, coupled with a postmodern middle
class discourse of choice, have largely led to women taking advantage of maternity leave within
the EU zone.
Paradoxically, these incentives are not accompanied by policies around childcare. Instead,
there is an increase in the privatisation of childcare throughout the EU. For example, in the UK,
nurseries and crèches are becoming unaffordable for medium- or low-income families (Euro-
pean Women’s Lobby 2012). Spain has introduced the French maternelle, providing free access
to schooling for children from the age of 3, while still leaving a deficit in childcare provision for
toddlers. Their families rely mostly on private funding and family and/or neighbourhood
networks. In Germany and Austria, costs for pre-school childcare are adjusted according to
the parents’ income. Nonetheless, in Germany, local governance entities, the Kommunen,
determine the amount of this contribution, which leads to disparities between the nursery offers
provided by the regional governing entities, the Länder (European Women’s Lobby 2012;
Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010).
In general, the response of the EU member states to care work is privatisation (Lutz 2008;
Erel 2012). Not only is child care generally inaccessible and unaffordable, but also care for the
physically and psychologically dependent is increasingly deemed a private matter. For example,
the UK has introduced “care for cash” and Austria “household cheques,” a form of cash
payment for households to subsidise the employment of a home-based care worker. In Spain,
the 2006 “Law of Dependency” (Ley de Dependencia), which guarantees the right to care for
physically and psychologically dependant people and their families, has been undermined by
cuts (Morales Junquero 2013). The majority of households with a member in need of care does
not currently receive any financial support. In 2002, Germany also initiated a care workers
scheme (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010). All these different programmes rely heavily on the
households to provide care but also on a female migrant labour force. The German scheme,
for example, is based on the temporary recruitment of care workers from Poland, Hungary, the
Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania and Bulgaria. Thus, while these policies aim at
gender equality within the European Union, they result in a perpetuation of local gender
inequalities, sustained by global gender inequalities (cf. Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Misra et al.
2006; Parreñas 2001; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010).
Feminist social policy and migration scholars have analysed the withdrawal of the state from
the sphere of care as symptomatic of the transformation of welfare regimes in the era of
globalisation (Erel 2012; Kofman 2012; Misra et al. 2006; Hobson et al. 2002; Williams
1995; Williams and Gavanas 2008). With regard to child care regimes, Williams and Gavanas
(2008) argue that the demand for migrant care workers epitomises the changing character of the
nation–state. Two different dynamics overlap here, “the (external) international geopolitical
The Precarity of Feminisation

context in which nation–welfare–states exist and (internal) processes of inclusion and exclu-
sion” (Williams and Gavanas 2008, p.14). Therefore, though some women might be able to
continue with gainful employment and pursue their careers, this can only be achieved by
delegating their responsibilities as “mothers” and “housewives” mainly to other women and to a
lesser extent to migrant men and, in some cases, to queer men (Manalansan 2006).
In most countries in the EU zone, care work has received some attention from the state in the
last decade. Yet, the focus has particularly been on personal care, while debates on domestic
work are largely silenced. In the last decade, only Spain and Italy have attempted to regularise
domestic workers’ conditions (ETUC 2012). This camouflages the fact that the job description
of a domestic worker very often includes care work and vice versa. As Bridget Anderson (2007)
argues, the demand for care workers “is only one of many factors shaping the labour market for
migrant domestic workers. Domestic work involves cleaning as well as caring” (p. 248). She
further notes in reference to Anderson and O’Connell Davidson (2003), that the demand for
carers is differently constructed than that for cleaners. However, regarding current debates on
care work, it is also important to emphasise the fact that these workers very often also clean
while they care. Thus, it is important to disentangle the sphere of care into three areas of work:
childcare, care of the elderly and domestic work. While personal care work, like childcare and
the care of the elderly, is being publicly debated, domestic work remains hidden.
It is not only domestic workers doing care work who are disregarded by the state focus on
care work, but also the increasing numbers of undocumented migrant women undertaking care
work in private households. Their contribution to the national economy is not officially
recorded (Misra et al. 2006, p. 320). Therefore, it can be argued that EU national migration
policies support the exploitation of these workers and render them invisible. Paradoxically,
domestic work hardly figures within the official migrant labour recruitment sectors, while
migrant labour for this sector is in high demand (Düvell 2005; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010).
Further, while migrant women are caring for “national” families, nation states disregard their
duty of care towards migrant families by restricting family reunification. The “welfare” of these
families is overshadowed by the aims of the state to control and restrict migration (Kofman
2011).
Thus, in private households employing a migrant care and/or domestic worker, we encounter
the immediate effects of migration policies. In this context, the dividing line between citizen and
migrant structures the mode of encounter between employers and domestic workers. Whilst it
might seem like a private issue, the organisation of domestic work in private households is a
public one. Indeed, while the state does not directly intervene in the employment arrangement
for domestic work in private households, its reluctance to regularise this work fosters its social
devaluation as domestic work is kept outside the framework of workers’ rights and the cost of
this labour is kept low.
While the private household’s demand for domestic workers increases, the state is engaged
in protecting its borders and its national labour market. In the meantime, the national labour
market continues to be supplied by cheap migrant labour which contributes to national
economic growth without any additional costs to the state (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003;
Herrera et al. 2005). Working under completely precarious conditions, these workers are
excluded from receiving any social benefits, unemployment and health insurance. Moreover
these workers not only contribute to the European states’ GDPs, but also to the circulation of
capital through social and financial remittances (Boccagni and Decimo 2013; Levitt 2001). In
addition they fundamentally support the career planning and personal development of more
privileged women without significantly disturbing the classical gender arrangement within the
households, in which the professional ambitions of partners who identify with masculinity are
predominant and prioritised. Set in the context of migration and care regimes (Williams and
 Gutiérrez-Rodríguez

Gavanas 2008), the private household is supported by the prevalence of processes of (re)production
characterised by feminisation, but also by the logic of coloniality, which endures in migration
policies that operate on the basis of “restricted or subordinated forms of citizenship” (Lewis 2005, p.
554). Further, the organisation of domestic work in private households articulates a broader societal
condition organising contemporary labour relations in Western Europe, namely, precarity.

Precarity: Between Feminisation and Coloniality

Although women’s access to the labour market in the EU has increased in the last decades (58.5 %
employment in comparison to men’s 70.9 %) (Eurostat 2012), qualitative progress remains
problematic. Women comprise the biggest share of what is coined the “inactive” population.
As feminist critics have argued, this term obfuscates the fact that unemployed people or stay-at-
home persons, mainly women, are not considered to be engaged in productive labour. Yet,
mothering, parenting, caring and domestic work is work. Therefore, the term “inactive” underlies
patriarchal ideology’s insistence on reproductive labour as “inactivity”. It is interesting that a high
percentage of women can be placed within this rubric. From 2000–2010, women’s “inactivity”
rate fell from 39.9 to 35.6 %, while men’s “inactivity” rate fell slightly from 22.9 to 22.4 %
(Eurostat 2012). The highest share of inactivity in women occurs between the ages of 25 and 54.
In 2010, 8.3 % of men in this age group were “inactive” and women accounted for 21.9 % with
half of them (10.1 %) indicating personal and family reasons for not pursuing paid work (Eurostat
2012).
These “inactivity” figures are remarkable if we consider that, three quarters of all women
work part-time (76.5 %), women are overrepresented in temporary work (Eurostat 2012) and
spend a significant amount of their productive time in raising children, caring for other family
members and doing household labour. Further, these figures focus on declared work, which not
only renders reproductive labour invisible, but also the increasing precarious and temporary
working conditions within the labour market. Labour reforms in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece
and the UK enable companies to employ workers on fixed-term contracts with flexible working
hours and on a hire and fire basis (European Women’s Lobby 2012; TNS Political and Social
2012). Further, companies unable or unwilling to cover the social costs and benefits for their
workers employ an outsourced workforce. On this basis, wages are flexibly and individually
negotiated, thus, cheapening the workforce. Labelled “undeclared” and “informal” work, these
employment arrangements evolve beyond state control by avoiding taxation (Pfau-Effinger
2009; Williams 2011) and noncompliance with collective trade union agreements regarding
workers’ entitlement to social benefits, health and unemployment insurance, standard working
hours, and holidays. In the last decade, precariousness has expanded into all the sectors of the
labour market in Europe (Barbieri 2009; Fernández and Lucio 2013; Leah et al. 2009).
It is this tendency to precariousness that the Madrid group Precarias a la Deriva (2004)
discusses as the feminisation of precarity. While referring to debates in twenty-first century
European Mediterranean social movements (Neilson and Rossiter 2008), Precarias a la Deriva
looks at precarity in order to understand contemporary subjectivities and social relations;
precarity, as such, not only defines precarious working and living conditions, but also a “being
in the world” shaped by constant uncertainty regarding life projects, opportunities and possi-
bilities. Reflecting the fragile position of the welfare state in European Mediterranean societies
and its expansion to other parts of the EU zone, precarity draws attention to the emergence of
new forms of resistance and political organisation rooted in encounters between dispersed
social groups. In the case of Spain, this is expressed in the social protests organised by disparate
parts of the population, from pensioners suing banks for withholding their pensions, to the
The Precarity of Feminisation

people affected by foreclosures evicted from their homes. These protests are no longer organised
through political factions, but attend to the immediacy of the precarisation of life created through
austerity measures and the withdrawal of the state from its duty of care for the common good.
It is in this context that Precarias a la Deriva stresses the relevance of thinking about care
work (trabajo de cuidados) in ethical, political and epistemological terms. For Precarias a la
Deriva, it is not just that care work is ascribed to women. Rather, care work is a new
paradigm organising contemporary relations of production and existence. With reference to
debates on the biopolitical quality of labour in advanced capitalism (Negri and Hardt 2000;
Lazzarato 1996, 2002; Negri 1999), this paradigm is defined by the incorporation and
commoditisation of skills attributed to women, as well as by the incorporation of the whole
subjective potential of the workforce into the process of production. This development is
characterised by the fluidity and dissolution of the divide between private and public
spheres. Precarious working conditions increase the need for survival strategies that rely
on social, neighbour, friendship and kinship support networks and on the ability of the
workforce to constantly adjust to new demands, situations and conditions. For Precarias a la
Deriva, this ability is intrinsic to women’s work.
Considering these, the focus on domestic and care work reveals how the experiences of
survival and devaluation related to feminisation play a fundamental role in current strategies of
capital accumulation (Precarias a la Deriva 2004; Vega Solís 2009). Therefore, processes of
feminisation along with the historical and cultural correlation of femininity with devaluation (cf.
Federici 2004; Bakker 2007; Peterson 2009; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010) are no longer only
attached to the sectors of work predominantly delivered by women such as care, cleaning, catering,
nursing, clerical and sex work. As Phizacklea and Wolkowitz (1995) observed, feminisation
describes a general process of devaluation of labour that encompasses “declining terms and
conditions of employment, so that a large proportion of the labour force has come to experience
‘feminised’ (that is, poor and insecure) conditions of work in some cases through deregulation at
the national level” (p. 3). Feminisation not only refers to women’s work and the increasing
participation of women in paid work, but to a general mode of production (Corsani 2007;
Fantone 2007; Ongaro 2003; Revel 2003; Sconvegno et al. 2007). While feminisation can shed
light on the specific dynamics of the social inscription of “femininity”, it is limited in its analysis
of racism. However, Anibal Quijano’s (2000, 2008) framework of the “coloniality of power”
helps to illuminate the analysis of the creation of social hierarchies through migration policies.
Quijano considers the racial classification of society as the primary axis of the “coloniality of
power”. Quijano develops his argument based on the analysis of the epistemological and
material impact of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism on post-independence, modern na-
tion–state building projects in Latin America, particularly Peru. Influenced by debates in Latin
American scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s on “internal coloniality” (cf. Gónzalez Casanova
2006), the concept of “coloniality of power” offers us a valuable approach for understanding
precarity in Europe (Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010). This is especially so when we examine the
impact of migration regimes on the classification of the population into different legal statuses,
which curtailed access to the EU labour market and produced differential treatment in regard to
citizenship status. While the EU migration regime does not explicitly operate with racial
categories, it resorts to a nominal classification logic that produces different degrees of inclusion
or exclusion to citizenship reminiscent of technologies of colonial othering. Thus, EU migration
policies institute a social classification system reminiscent of colonial thinking which creates an
“exteriority” (Dussel 1995) to the community of national citizens. Labour migrants represent
this “exteriority”. Their exclusion is mediated by historical ties, which are reflected in the visa
requirements for citizens from former European colonies for entry to enter the EU. Further,
historical forms of orientalisation of Eastern and Southern Europeans as the “other” of
 Gutiérrez-Rodríguez

European modernity are reactivated within contemporary migration control debates. Migration
control discourses thus operate on the premise of the logic of the coloniality of power. On this
basis, differential rights are created which entail precarious forms of citizenship.
This becomes apparent, for example, in the entry and settlement requirements migrants and
refugees must fulfil to establish their lives within the EU zone. If they do not comply with the
requirements set by migration laws, they are denied entry to Europe and if they enter without
permission, they risk falling into an explicit zone of dehumanisation by being made “illegal”.
Here, the question of precarity is intrinsically connected to becoming undocumented, which in
turn, restricts their freedom of movement and entry to the labour market (Düvell 2005; Marouki
et al. 2011). “Illegalisation” also means being exposed to the constant threat of deportation, as
well as precarious, unsafe and exploitative working conditions. When a migrant, and in particular
an undocumented migrant, woman is employed as a domestic worker in private households,
feminisation intersects with the logic of the coloniality of power. Thus, migration policies, as we
have previously discussed, shape the sphere of private households. Precarity is not only
characterised by feminisation and heteronormativity, but also by the coloniality of power.

Conclusion

This article has argued that it is again necessary to focus on the feminisation of labour within the
contemporary “crisis” in the EU. Drawing attention to the expansion of precarious work and to the
increasing uncertainties in the organisation of a sustainable life, the discussion on the feminisation
of precarity highlighted the conditions to which, particularly, Southern European societies are
subjected. Taking this development as a tendency for a new moment in the EU zone, precarity
signals the reactivation and reshuffling of an old system of devaluation shaped by feminisation,
heteronormativity, and the coloniality of power. As this article has attempted to demonstrate, these
reflect specific historical processes of differentiation and regulation of the social, epitomised in
domestic and care work as expressions of precarity.
As we have seen, the analysis of precarity not only requires a reconsideration of feminisation,
but also an analysis of the coloniality of labor. The relevance of migration policies in creating
different categories of citizens and non-citizens reiterates the colonial logic of dehumanization.
As Enrique Dussel (1995) reminds us, through the racial categorization of the population in
colonial times, Black and indigenous persons were set as inferior to the White European
colonizers, reducing them to “thingness”. This enabled the exploitation of their labor force
without any costs being expended on their reproduction. While contemporary European migra-
tion policies do not explicitly operate within a colonial racial matrix, they resonate with a pattern
of thinking from colonial times. The analysis of coloniality refers to the endurance of this pattern
of thinking in the shaping of contemporary societies. It is in this regard that Quijano's framework
of the coloniality of power becomes pertinent for the analysis of migration policies and precarity
in Western Europe. European migration policies are based on a differential categorization system
establishing different degrees of protection in regard to citizenship and working rights. Further,
as is the case for “undocumented” migrants, the failure in achieving legal residency status
exposes these citizens to exploitative working conditions and infrahuman living conditions. In
this context, precarity not only denotes the deregulation of workers’ rights and cheapening of the
labor force, but also the precariousness of existence.
Thus, the analysis of the precarity of feminisation highlights the need for critical investigation
of the heteronormative matrix governing the sphere of gender, family and migration policies and
the enduring racist logic dividing the population into ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’. It is this logic that
the analysis of the ‘coloniality of power’ addresses.
The Precarity of Feminisation

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Susie Jacobs, Christian Klesse, Erika Doucette and Shirley Anne
Tate for their comments.

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