Farris CHP 5

CHAPTER 5
The Political Economy of Femonationalism
All industrial and commercial centres in England now have a working class divided
into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary
English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who forces down the stan-
dard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he feels himself to be a member of the
ruling nation and, therefore, makes himself a tool of his aristocrats and capitalists
against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He harbours
religious, social and national prejudices against him. His attitude t owards him
is roughly that of the “poor whites” to the “niggers” in the former slave states of the
American Union. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money.
He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of English
rule in Ireland. This antagonism is kept artificially alive and intensified by the press,
the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling
class. This antagonism is the secret of the English working class’s impotence, de-
spite its organisation. It is the secret of the maintenance of power by the capitalist
class. And the latter is fully aware of this.
—karl marx, “Letter to Sigfrid Meyer and Karl Vogt,” 475
In their introduction to Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers

in the New Economy (2003), Barbara Ehrenreich and Russell Arlie Hochs
Copyright © 2017. Duke University Press. All rights reserved.
child describe the role of the First World like that of the “old-fashioned
male in the family—pampered, entitled, unable to cook, clean, or find his
socks.” On the other hand, they continue, “poor countries take on a role
like that of the traditional woman within the family—patient, nurturing
and self-denying.”1 This depiction of the relation between the Global North
and the Global South in terms of the sexual division of labor within the
household should not be understood as merely a metaphor for the power
relations and uneven development engendered by neoliberal globalization.
Farris, Sara R.. In the Name of Women's Rights : The Rise of Femonationalism, Duke University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=4845301.
Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2022-01-23 23:00:09.
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
U.K.
Greece
EU-15
Austria
Denmark
Germany
France
Italy
Netherlands*
Ireland
Portugal
Sweden
Spain
Luxembourg
Finland
Belgium
Women Men
Figure 5.1 Foreign-born immigrant population by sex in the eu-15 in 2010.

source: calculations based on eurostat (online data code: [migr_imm1ctz]).
*data for 2010 are not available for the netherlands.
Rather, it should be taken quite literally: poor countries increasingly pro-

vide the nannies, maids, and sex workers for rich countries.
Particularly from the 1990s onward, western Europe has become one of
the continents—along with Latin Americ a and Oceania—registering the
largest increase in women’s presence in immigration inflows.2 According
to Eurostat, in 2010 “foreign-born” women outnumbered men among im-
migrants in Ireland, Greece, France, Italy, and Denmark, whereas they are
close to half in all other countries (figure 5.1).3

In so cio
log
i
cal terms, the growth of female migration to western
Europe—which began in the mid-1970s—represents the unintended con-
sequence of the guestworker systems established in northern Europe a fter
World War II. While the policies of stopping new migration inflows and
the return programs for resident migrants in the aftermath of the 1973 re-
cession had the goal of lessening the number of migrant workers and of
using them as “safety valves” to reduce unemployment among native-born
The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 147
workers, a number of migrants decided to s ettle and to bring their spouses
and family members with them.4 Furthermore, the difficulty of acquiring
work permits in northern European destination countries reoriented l abor
flows toward southern Europe, which had until then been sending waves
of emigrants and had not yet, therefore, developed clear immigration poli-
cies.5 To alter slightly a saying well known among Italian sociologists of
migration, “Northern European states wanted only hands, instead human
beings (and their wives and children) arrived.” Although women had al-
ways been present in migration flows (and even in predominant numbers,
depending on the sending country, as in the case of the Philippines, and on
the type of move, as in short-distance migration), from the mid-1970s on-
ward the number of them making long-distance moves increased dramati-
cally.6 After an initial gender blindness in the 1970s and 1980s, there has
been a growing body of literature focusing on the presence of w omen in
international migration to western Europe and on the plurality of their mi-
gratory patterns and motives (see chapter 1).7 Family reunification remains
the main “official” motivation b ehind a significant proportion of female
migration to the continent, although this does not prevent w omen who
have entered as spouses or family members from participating in the labor
market, often in the shadow economy.8 Despite Muslim and non-western
migrant women’s growing numbers and the variety and richness of their
migratory patterns, their job opportunities are in fact largely confined to a
limited number of occupations. As previously noted, the majority of those
who actively participate in the western European labor market are em-
ployed in one single branch of the economy, namely, the social reproduc-
tive sector (cleaning, care domestic, and health care work).9 As a number
of scholars have emphasized, the demand for labor in this sector has grown
so much over the past twenty years that it is now regarded as the main rea-
son for the feminization of international migration.10

In chapter 4 I illustrated how femonationalist policies on civic integra-
tion depict non-western women (and Muslims in particular) as individu-
als in need of economic independence and emancipation, yet push them
to work in poorly paid (or wholly unpaid) and highly feminized labor
markets such as care and domestic work. We should ask, then, is there a
possible connection between Muslim and non-western migrant women’s
segregation in the social reproductive sector and the femonationalist ide-
ological formation? Why do femonationalists declare solidarity toward
148 Chapter 5
t hese women as supposedly “oppressed” subjects, while concealing the fact
that a large number of them are required to work, or are already exploited,
in the care and cleaning economy? As I have discussed throughout this
book, both official discourses and public policies concerning the integra-
tion of immigrants are highly gendered. Accordingly, it is men and not
so much women who create troubles for the integration process.11 Con-
sidered to be the makers and ultimate guardians of what western Euro
peans regard as backward and misogynistic cultural codes, Muslim and
non-western migrant men are indicted as the real obstacle to “social and
cultural integration,” thereby representing a cultural threat to the western
European whole. Even when it is the veiled Muslim w oman, for instance,
who seems to be targeted as a cultural danger when she refuses to take off
the hijab or the burqa and therefore to adapt to secular cultural norms,
she is depicted as if she does so not on the basis of a personal choice—
since these accounts deny Muslim w omen’s agency—but because she is
oppressed by men.12 However, as I discussed in chapter 4 in particular,
we should note that Muslim and non-western migrant men and w omen
are perceived and depicted in different and often opposed ways also at the
level of economic integration. Hence, right-wing nationalist slogans that
call for “jobs for ‘nationals’ ” (which are important for the electoral success
of these parties) should be read, I argue, “jobs for ‘national’ men.” Whereas
the “sexualization of racism,” that is, the singling out of migrant men and
women according to racialized gendered stereotypes, has been widely ana-
lyzed both in terms of the “culturalization” of xenophobic tropes concern-
ing supposed unbridgeable differences between western and non-western
cultures (or civilizations), and in terms of the colonial legacy deeply rooted
in the stereotypical representations in the western European imaginary of
Muslim and non-western migrant women, the political-economic logic
underpinning femonationalism has been largely overlooked. However, a

closer look at the differences between Muslim and non-western migrant
men and w omen in the western European economic arena can enable us
to shed further light on some equally crucial reasons for the double (gen-
dered) standard applied by western European nationalists and neoliberal
governments to the migrant population.
To this end, the chapter is organized as follows: first, I analyze the spe-
cific role of non-western migrant workers in contemporary western Eu
ropean economies by drawing upon the theoretical insights provided by
the concept of the “reserve army of labor.” Developed particularly by Karl
Marx in volume 1 of Capital, and subsequently taken up by economic soci-
ologists and sociologists of migration from the 1970s onward, the framing
of migrant labor in terms of a “reserve army” is of great use in deciphering
both the economic and the political status of this peculiar type of labor
in its current configuration. Second, I concentrate on an analysis of non-
western female migrant labor, which is overrepresented in the care and do-
mestic sector, in order to ask w hether its specificities in western European
economies tell us something about the special status enjoyed by Muslim
and non-western migrant w omen in the anti-immigration campaigns qua
“redeemable subjects” deserving defense and even “salvation.”
Ultimately, as these discussions shall demonstrate, the double standard
applied to Muslim and non-western migrant women in the public imagi-
nary as a section of the migrant population in need of special attention
and even “rescue” cannot be understood solely through the lenses offered
by analyses focused largely on the culturalization of racism, the securitar-
ian agendas of neoliberal states, and the colonial heritage of the sexualiza-
tion of racism. Albeit crucial, these lenses need to be supplemented with a
specific understanding of Muslim and non-western migrant women’s eco-
nomic role within the context of the neoliberal reforms in welfare regimes
in the direction of the so-called commodification of care, the feminization
and racialization of specific labor markets, the management of migration by
western European states, and the current reconfiguration of gender o rders.
All these factors contribute, I will argue, to configuring female migrant
labor employed in the reproductive sector as a “regular” rather than a “reserve
army of labor.”
Migrants as a Reserve Army of Labor

Migrant workers in western economies play the role of what Marx famously,
albeit not exclusively, called a “reserve army of labor,” namely, “a mass of
human material always ready for exploitation.”13 In Marx’s analysis, (a) the
increase in the magnitude of social capital, that is, the ensemble of indi-
vidual capitals; (b) the enlargement of the scale of production; and (c) the
growth of the productivity of an increasing number of workers brought
about by capital accumulation create a situation in which the greater “at-
traction of laborers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion.”14
150 Chapter 5
ese three interrelated processes, for Marx, set the conditions according
Th
to which the laboring population gives rise, “along with the accumulation
of capital produced by it, [also to] the means by which it itself is made
relatively superfluous, is turned into a relative surplus population; and it
does this to an always increasing extent.”15 Marx describes this as a law of
population, which is peculiar to the capitalist mode of production just as
other modes of production have their own corresponding population laws.
The paradox of the creation of the surplus laboring population u nder the
capitalist mode of production is that while it is “a necessary product of
accumulation,” this surplus population is also the lever of such accumula-
tion; namely, it is that which “forms a disposable industrial reserve army,
that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its
own cost.”16
The discussion about the creation of the reserve army of labor is strictly
related to Marx’s analysis of the organic composition of capital and the ten-
dency of capitalist accumulation to encourage the increase “of its constant,
at the expense of its variable constituent.”17 In other words, the creation of
a pool of unemployed and underemployed (or what Marx calls the three
forms of the reserve army of labor: floating, stagnant, and latent) is due to
capital’s need to increase the mass and value of the means of production
(i.e., machines), at the cost of the decrease of the mass and value of living
labor (i.e., wages and workers). Indeed, a crucial element in the reduction
of wages and workers, or variable capital, is technical development and
mechanization, which alongside other factors leads to the expulsion of a
number of laborers from the productive process and therefore to the cre-
ation of a surplus of workers who are no longer needed. This notwithstand-
ing, Marx saw an inescapable limit to mechanization, for labor power is
the main source of surplus value and, therefore, it is that component of the
labor process that cannot be entirely replaced by machines. This is one of

the reasons why in order to guarantee and increase capital’s accumulation,
the history of capitalism has seen the development of a number of strate-
gies all aimed at decreasing the mass and value of variable capital, but also
at limiting the pitfalls of complete mechanization. Some of t hese strategies
have been (a) relocation of production in areas with cheap labor, instead
of investments in costly technological innovation to maintain productive
sites in areas with “pricey” labor power and (b) a resort to the supply of
cheap labor usually provided by migrant workers, particularly in the case
of nonrelocatable productive sectors (like construction and the service
industry, for instance), thereby giving rise to forms of competition between
“native” and “non-native” workers for the jobs available. For this set of rea-
sons, as the passage at the beginning of this chapter testifies, already in
Marx’s time migrants occupied a special place within the capitalist repro-
duction of surplus laboring populations, a situation that enabled capital
ists to maintain wage discipline and to inhibit working-class solidarity by
means of the application of a divide et impera logic. In nineteenth-century
and early twentieth-century western Europe they were usually rural work-
ers forced to move to the cities or to neighboring regions/nations due
to land dispossession and the process of industrialization as well as due to
state policies aimed at providing l abor power for the growing urban manu-
facturing industries.18 From the mid-twentieth century onward, the stock
of migrant laborers to western Europe, especially northern Europe, was
increasingly composed of southern European and non-European subjects
(mostly male) seeking to find work in richer cities, often coinciding with
the metropoles that had dominated and impoverished their countries of
origin under colonialism.
In spite of its analytical power, the concept of the reserve army of labor
has not always enjoyed much fortune. Particularly in the 1960s, the hege-
mony in the sociology of migration of rational-choice approaches explaining
population movements as the result of individual decisions contributed
to marginalize and discredit this classically Marxian concept within the
mainstream. It was only in the 1970s and 1980s that a new generation of
scholars began to employ again the notion of a reserve army of labor to
describe migrants as specific divisions of labor power.19 Through this no-
tion, they tried in particular to understand migrant labor and the growth
of international migrations within the broader framework of uneven de-
velopment, of capitalist expansion in preindustrial societies, and of the

erosion of rural economies as well as of agreements between states. Thus,
they sought to highlight the elements of overdetermination and multi-
directionality implied in such phenomena. In their groundbreaking 1973
work Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, Stephen
Castles and Gudula Kosack defined “the unemployed masses of the less
developed areas . . . [as] a new type of industrial reserve army—an exter-
nal one consisting of desperate, impoverished men who can be recruited
or sent away as the employers’ interests dictate.”20 Between the 1950s and
152 Chapter 5
the end of the 1960s, the employment of migrants from poorer areas of
western Europe allowed industries to maintain low wages in key driving
sectors of the economy (mostly manufacturing and construction), thus
contributing to high profit rates and supporting gdp growth. By subject-
ing migrants to working longer hours, greater labor intensity, the least
safe conditions, and the most job insecurity, employers could save on the
costs of the organization of work and social reproduction.21 Savings in the
costs of social reproduction w ere possible also thanks to the recruitment of
young and more productive (i.e., healthy) migrants, thus allowing compa-
nies to avoid paying “the costs of ‘rearing’ the worker and the maintenance
costs a fter his/her working life” ended.22 Furthermore, as these workers
were often unmarried or else lived with their families in conditions signifi-
cantly below the standard of nonmigrant units, employers did not bear the
costs of reproduction for them and their families. The “disposability” of
the reserve army of migrant labor became particularly evident in the after-
math of the 1973 crisis. This was the first international crisis of capitalism
in western Europe to occur in coincidence with the massive presence of
international, extra-European migrants. Between 1973 and 1974 the entry
of foreign workers was restricted, migrant workers’ rate of unemploy-
ment increased dramatically, and return paths w ere established in order
to encourage resident migrants to go back to their sending countries.23
Furthermore, the rising climate of xenophobia, exasperated by the growth
of unemployment during the crisis, contributed to their identification as
“competitors” to the native-born workforce, thereby jeopardizing forms of
class solidarity and u nionization.24 Since the 1973 crisis in particular, the
association between economic downturns, migrant workers’ rising rates of
unemployment, and restrictions to entry and to rights has become com-
monplace in the scholarly literature.25 Although continuing to employ the
concept of a “reserve army” to describe the condition of migrant work-

ers, more recent approaches have tended to reinterpret it, particularly in
the attempt to tackle the increased complexity of migrant labor and inter-
national migration flows in the twenty-first century. Accordingly, we can
identify three main tendencies in the specialized literature, which seek to
problematize and/or reformulate the concept of a reserve army of labor in
the changed conditions of the post-Fordist neoliberal conjuncture.
On the one hand, several migration scholars have interrogated the reserve
army of labor theory in terms of the emphasis it puts upon the antagonism
among workers for wages, brought about by capital’s constant tendency to
reduce them. Hence, migrant labor in western European societies in partic
ular has been analyzed in terms of w hether it plays the role of “competitor”
or “complement” to the native workforce.26 As numerous studies all across
Europe have shown, migrants are employed in particular in the informal
sector, doing those jobs—the famous three D jobs (dirty, dangerous, and
demanding)—that “national” workers tend to refuse, due in large part to
their extremely low salaries and severe working conditions.27 This approach
has thus effectively highlighted the fact that migrants often do not compete
with native workers for the same jobs; rather, they are employed in t hose
sectors that have been “abandoned” by the latter. In this light, it has been
questioned whether migrant labor should still be described as a reserve
army, a label that points to a role—that of “competitor”—that migrant
workers do not play. While this perspective has had the salutary effect
of neutralizing, or at least of problematizing, the most politically pressing
(and false) accusation against migrant workers “stealing jobs,” arguably it
has also tended to reduce the category of the reserve army to that of com-
petition for jobs. One possible political effect of the creation of a reserve
army—namely, its enforced antagonism with native-born employees—has
thus been treated as a cause, or an element that defines w hether or not a
fraction of the workforce belongs to the surplus laboring population.
Other scholars, on the other hand, argue that the concept of a reserve
army of labor should not be used for migrant workers alone. According to
this perspective, the neoliberal restructuring of the economy in western
Europe has established the conditions to turn all workers into actual or
potential reserve soldiers of the labor market. Decentralization of wage
bargaining, the increasing individualization of contractual conditions, and
the growth of fixed-term contracts that put a larger number of workers
in a state of extreme precarity are the main r ecipes of the so-called post-
Fordist reorganization of labor. In their discussion of the “segmentation
of the wage-earning class,” for instance, Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello,
quoting Christophe Dejours, consider “the constitution of a ‘reserve army’
of workers condemned to permanent insecurity, to underpayment and to a
staggering job flexibility” as a generalized condition that affects low-skilled
workers in particular.28 This argument identifies an important trend affect-
ing the status of labor in contemporary western Europe. Furthermore, it
154 Chapter 5
highlights the fact that the creation of a reserve army is not restricted to
the case of migrant workers but is a structural outcome of the current eco-
nomic system. Nonetheless, the limits of this approach, in my view, lie in its
unbridled extension and consequent dilution of the notion of the reserve
army, thereby undermining its analytic value. In particular, by classifying
national and migrant workers alike as indiscriminately ranked troops of
the global reserve army of labor under neoliberalism, we miss fundamen-
tal differences: namely, the deprivation of political and social rights that
migrant workers suffer and their consequently worse working and living
conditions.29 As noncitizens and often “illegal” residents and/or workers,
migrants still constitute the most disposable and fragile workforce in west-
ern societies. Though migrant labor has become much more complex in
the last twenty years, with forms of informal and self-employment in so-
called migrants’ or “ethnic enclaves” and the creation of multiple layers of
segmented labor markets on the rise, migrant workers have continued to
be at the sharp end of unemployment.30
Still other scholars place more emphasis on the role of the state in help-
ing create reserve armies of labor through market deregulation, welfare re-
forms, and “managed migration.” Rather than providing forms of social pro-
tection for the growing number of unemployed and underemployed, state
policies in the last fifteen years have acted to exacerbate forms of individu-
alization of labor contracts, which are responsible for the precarization and
unemployment of large masses of working people. Furthermore, the closure
of state borders and the reforms in immigration controls in the direction of
promoting temporary (or circular) migration, have de facto contributed to
turn many migrants into underemployed or unemployed reserve soldiers of
the national army of labor, once the job contract and visa have expired. As a
consequence, as it has been argued for the British case in a way that could be
easily extended to other western European contexts, the concept of a reserve

army of l abor accurately captures the recent direction of immigration policy,
“in which migrant workers are treated less as potential citizens than units
of labor, the supply of which can (in theory at least) be turned on and off.”31
Accordingly, the formation of surplus laboring populations is not merely the
outcome of the intrinsic logic of accumulation of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction, but also of the active role of the state as the most important media-
tor of capitalists’ interests under neoliberal capitalism.
Following particularly on this latter approach, I would like to suggest
that the Marxian notion of the reserve army of labor, together with t hose
theories that highlight the operations of the nation-state in helping pro-
duce and reproduce such reserve, is an essential tool for describing the
conditions of migrant labor in the present conjuncture. In particular, it
enables us to decipher both the economic and the political process of the
construction of migrant workers as a new global class of dispossessed in
several ways. It highlights how the role of the “disposable” and “replaceable”
workforce played by migrants within the global economy is a structural
outcome of capitalist accumulation and not a phenomenon brought about
by international migrations themselves. Migrants are often unemployed
workers who, due to the failures of structural adjustment programs and
land dispossession, w ere expelled from production processes in their own
countries as part of a “surplus-working population”; furthermore, they are
among the first to lose their jobs and to fill the ranks of the stagnant west-
ern European reserve army when a crisis occurs, as the 1973 oil crisis dem-
onstrated and as the recent global economic crisis confirmed.32 While in
periods of economic boom and low unemployment rates employers usu-
ally profit from migrant workers and use them in order to impose wage
discipline, during periods of economic downturn or stagnation these same
workers are turned into scapegoats for the bad economic situation. Nowa-
days, all across Europe migrants are frequently presented as constituting a
reserve of cheap labor whose presence threatens “national” workers with
job losses, a lowering of their incomes, and a worsening of welfare provi-
sions (schools, health system services, housing, etc.). High rates of unem-
ployment, the consequences of the recent dramatic economic crisis, and
the continuous erosion of workers’ rights are all elements that intensify
the idea of competition between “national” and “non-national” laborers.
In this context, the significant rise of right-wing nationalist parties cam-

paigning under the banner of opposition to immigration, and to Muslim
migrants in particular, as an economic and social threat suggests how t hese
parties have benefited from, and further exacerbated, a climate of fear of
the foreigner that seems to constitute the regular offspring of times of crisis.
This notwithstanding, I argued earlier that Muslim and non-western
migrant women in contemporary western Europe are neither presented nor
perceived in the same way as migrant men. Not only are they spared from
being characterized as an economic and social danger to western Euro
156 Chapter 5
pean populations like the men are, but they are also foregrounded as sub-
jects whom seemingly benevolent nationalists and neoliberals want to in-
tegrate and emancipate. Moreover, the role these women play within the
contemporary capitalist economy, as a fraction of migrant labor segregated
in a newly commodified sector such as care and domestic work, is arguably
also different. Why is this the case?
Female Migration and the Commodification of Care

and Domestic Labor
As I began to illustrate in the introduction to this chapter, Muslim and

non-western women are highly concentrated in very few occupations, with
42 percent of them in western Europe working in three sectors alone: the care
and domestic sector in private h ouseholds, the care sector in hospitals, and
residential care and home care and cleaning activities (table 5.1). Muslim and
non-western migrant women are thus mostly employed in so-called social
reproduction, with the care and domestic occupations in private households
absorbing almost a quarter of them on average and between a half and a
third of them in the Mediterranean countries (50 percent in Italy, 38 percent
in Greece, 36 percent in Spain, and 29 percent in Portugal).33 Whereas of-
ficial statistics count 22 percent of “foreign-born” women as being employed
in care and domestic work in the western European countries, only 5 percent
of “native-born” w omen are found in the same sector.
The difference between foreign-born and native-born women even
reaches 11 percent as compared to 1 percent if we consider only those
women occupied in “activities of households as employers of domestic per-
sonnel,” which includes mostly low-skilled, low-paid domestic work hired
by individual families. Though official statistics emphasize the importance
of foreign-born women in the sector, these data tend to be mostly “con-

servative” because a reliable estimate of the share of migrants employed
as care and domestic workers is difficult to provide. This is due both to
differences in data collection in different countries and above all to the fact
that a large part of this work is carried out by undocumented migrants, or
in the shadow economy.34 Migrant care workers and domestic workers in
private households face different employment conditions, depending upon
the country’s management of the migration of unskilled labor and of care
provision, as well as upon the specific culture of care. Thus, migrants can
Table 5.1 Top Five Sectors for Employment of Foreign-Born Women in the EU-15 in 2012 (in Percentages)
Care–domestic Residential care and Services to

work in private human health and Food and beverage buildings (cleaning
households other care services service activities Retail trade activities)
Country (Nace2 97–88)* (Nace2 86, 87, 96) (Nace2 56) (Nace2 47) (Nace2 81) All sectors
Austria 3 15 12 12 11 100
Belgium 12 13 8 6 24 100
Germany 7 15 10 12 10 100

Denmark 14 15 7 7 9 100
Spain 36 8 15 9 6 100
Finland 8** 24 6 15 11 100
France 24 18 6 9 10 100
Greece 38 8 15 10 7 100
Ireland 7 20 12 17 6 100
Italy 50 10 9 4 6 100
Luxembourg 17 6 6 2 8 100
Netherlands 9.3** 16 9 13 11 100
Portugal 29 14 20 8 10 100
Sweden 8.6** 19 9 6 11 100
United Kingdom 5 19 7 9 6 100
EU-15 22 14 10 9 8 100
Source: Calculations are based on the Labor Force Survey. Extraction data provided by Eurostat upon request on May 31, 2013.
*Nace is the statistical classication of economic activities in the European Community. The details of the classification are available at: http://ec.europa
.eu/eurostat/ramon/i ndex.c fm?TargetUrl=DSP_P
UB_W
ELC&StrLanguageCode=EN.
**Data are not available for “Activities on households as employers of domestic personnel” (Nace2 97).
be hired on an hourly (and often informal) basis, as is prevalently the case
in France and the Netherlands or as live-in workers, as in Italy and Spain.35
In order to understand the exception constituted by Muslim and non-
western migrant women in contemporary western Europe as a migrant
workforce that seems to be spared from accusations of posing an economic,
social, or cultural threat, we thus need to look more closely at care and do-
mestic work. In other words, if we want to decipher the materiality of the
femonationalist ideology in the Netherlands, France, and Italy, we should
pay close attention to the current institutional and informal arrangements
that t hese nation-states make when dealing with care and domestic labor
and female migrant workers. What is it that distinguishes the care and do-
mestic sector, where Muslim and non-western migrant w omen are mostly
employed, or directed to find employment, from other sectors that employ
mostly male migrants?
The Netherlands
As one of the Dutch leading scholars on migrant domestic workers, Sarah
van Walsum, has argued, “Dutch mainstream and policy-oriented re-
searchers on labor migration have systematically overlooked the fact that
many migrants are (illegally) employed in Dutch homes, while the few
quantitative researchers who have investigated the Dutch market in (un-
declared) domestic services have remained equally silent on the role that
migrants and ethnic minorities play in this sector.”36 And yet, as several
sources (research institutes and trade u nion reports, postgraduate disser-
tations, and domestic workers’ organizations) have demonstrated, not only
are non-western migrants (often undocumented and female) and ethnic
minority women a significant presence in Dutch h ouseholds, particularly
as housekeepers and child-minders, but this presence is also likely to grow
in the near future. Institutional rearrangements occurring in the elderly

care system and changes affecting w omen’s employment patterns in partic
ular point in this direction. A brief overview of the Dutch welfare regime in
historical perspective, therefore, will help shed light on this phenomenon.
The demand for migrant workers in the care and particularly domestic
sector in the Netherlands has been slowly mounting since the early 1980s.
It has gone hand in hand with the establishment of laws aimed at increas-
ing the participation of Dutch w omen in the labor market and through
the creation of semiprofessional figures, like that of the “alpha-helper”
(alphahulp), with precarious and unregulated working conditions. The role
of the alpha-helper, an individual caregiver who works directly with the el
derly or dependent person at home, was initially introduced in 1977. Such
a figure was explicitly promoted as a measure to increase Dutch women’s
rates of activity (among the lowest in Europe at that time), on the basis of
the assumption that, since their income was only meant to complement
their husbands’, they could well work u nder inferior conditions.37 Thus, the
figure of the alpha-helper was made tax-exempt, with no guaranteed mini-
mum wage and no unemployment and illness-insurance benefits. Since
2007, with the decentralization of the provision of subsidized household
services to municipalities (wmo—Maatschappelijke Ondersteuning), the
hiring of alpha-helpers has again been on the rise, but nowadays many of
them are likely to be migrants. According to the new regulation, private
employers who hire a domestic worker, including so-called alpha-helpers,
for no more than three days a week, are tax-exempt and are not required
to pay social security contributions or to register the employment relation-
ship. Since the introduction of the wmo “a marked increase in the per-
centage of alpha-helpers engaged in the provision of subsidized household
services from 20 to 80 percent” has been recorded, alongside a “growth in
the recruitment of personnel via commercial cleaning companies, a seg-
ment of the Dutch labor market in which ethnic minorities are strongly
over-represented.”38 Though it is not yet clear what the current share of
“allochthonous” workers in this new decentralized scenario is, we also
know that Dutch municipalities are putting pressure on unemployed eth-
nic minority (often Muslim) women to accept work in the care and do-
mestic sector, frequently through civic integration programs in the case
of non-eu/non-western migrant women (see chapter 4). The new regula-
tions have thus greatly encouraged the reproduction of care and domestic
work as an informal and hidden sector where undocumented and unpro-

tected migrants, or ethnic minority women, are increasingly likely to be
employed. Studies conducted at the local level by research institutes, trade
unions and scholars working in the field speak of more than one million
migrants (often undocumented) who are employed as domestic helpers
(housekeepers and sometimes babysitters) working on an hourly basis in
private h
ouseholds.39 Though Dutch immigration policies are very restric-
tive, making it “practically impossible to obtain a work-permit for private
domestic or care services,” they have contributed to increasing the demand
160 Chapter 5
for foreign-born women in the sector.40 As for social care for elderly and
dependent persons in “public” institutions, official statistics talk of a mod-
est rise in the number of allochthonous workers between 1999 and 2004
when compared to other branches of the economy.41 The relatively low
number of first-generation immigrant workers in the elderly care sector in
public institutions has largely resulted from the fact that this branch of the
economy offers relatively good working conditions, with the possibility for
part-time work and career development within it.42
In the Netherlands, therefore, Muslim and non-western migrant women
are frequently relegated to the low-skill, low-paid, unregulated jobs of the
private care and domestic economy. Although their importance to this sector
goes entirely unrecognized by official statistics, the new state regulations
on decentralized recruitment in social care as well as the management of
migration and integration programs are pushing more and more migrant
women to work in this economic niche, for which the supply of native-
born labor is scarce.
France
Like in the Netherlands and other eu countries, in France Muslim and
non-western migrant w omen, as well as w
omen from other minority groups,
are overrepresented in the social care and domestic sector (services à la
personne).43 This is related both to the economic dynamism of social care
professions and domestic work (due to the aging of the population and the
higher rates of labor activity of French w omen) and to the possibility of
working in this sector without certificates or diplomas. France is one of the
eu countries with the highest rates of w
omen’s economic activity and women
working in full-time positions. However, this has not translated into a fair
44
division of care and domestic work between the sexes. In order to tackle
this problem, since the beginning of the 1990s a number of schemes have
been introduced with the main aim of simplifying the procedures and re-
ducing the costs related to the outsourcing of care and domestic work to
paid employees. In 2006 the French government introduced the chèque
emploi-service universel (cesu; universal service of employment through
checks), presented as a measure aimed at “giving French citizens the ‘means
[to] better articulate their family and professional lives’ by freeing them
from the constraints of everyday life and to extend the use of paid domes-
tic service to the ‘largest number of people possible.’ ”45 U
nder the cesu
scheme, a family can hire a domestic worker by paying him or her with
checks that can be purchased at the local bank. Employers can benefit from
this scheme as they can claim an income-tax reduction of 50 percent on
these costs, whereas the employee is paid at the national minimum wage.
Furthermore, companies can contribute to the costs their employees face
in purchasing the checks and claim a tax reduction of 25 percent on this
expenditure. The employment of domestic workers takes place not only
through direct hiring by a private employer, but also through other ac-
tors such as private companies that offer cleaning, gardening, and home
maintenance services and nonprofit associations that provide care for the
elderly and the children. In all cases, however, the new cesu policies have
become the main generator of jobs in the care and domestic sector. “While
contributing to the normalization of undeclared employment in the sec-
tor,” as Scrinzi argues, “these policies did not challenge the association
of these jobs with feminine unpaid domestic work.”46 Furthermore, they
strengthened “class and ethnicity/nationality divisions, based on families’
differential access to commodified care service” and “have also resulted
in an increased segmentation of the labor market on the basis of a racial-
ized and gendered organization of work.”47 Despite evidence suggesting
that Muslim and non-western women make up the lion’s share of supply in
care and domestic jobs, for which the demand is on the rise, French govern-
ments, like their Dutch counterparts, have been reluctant to acknowledge
that such work is a highly significant economic sector for migrants. As a
result, no specific work permit is issued for migrant domestic workers. Fur-
thermore, in France statistics very rarely refer to “ethnic categories” with the
result that t here is l ittle data concerning the nationality or the country of ori-
gin of t hese workers. This notwithstanding, a study of the patterns of elderly
care shows that it has become a refuge job for Muslim w omen who are faced
with discrimination and racism in other types of employment.48
Italy
The growing demand for social care by Italian families in the last twenty
years in particular is the reason for the mounting numbers of migrants
employed by private households as housekeepers and especially caregivers
(badanti; sing., badante). This situation has not only received increasing
media attention, but also prompted sociologists, migration scholars, and
162 Chapter 5
feminists to speak of a fundamental transition occurring in Italian society
from a “family model of care” to a “migrant in the family model of care.”49
In Italy the f amily is the main actor providing care for the elderly, disabled,
and children. The recognition of the crucial role played by families, how-
ever, has not translated into policies that support their members in their
caring activities (such as public provisions or public/affordable care ser
vices). For instance, in the case of elderly or dependent persons, the main
form of long-term care (ltc) in Italy is the cash attendance allowance (in-
dennità di accompagnamento, i.e., a needs-tested measure that can be spent
at the complete discretion of the beneficiary). The cash attendance allow-
ance was established in 1980 in order to cope with the demand for care
by “the citizen who is unable to work and does not have the necessary
means for survival.”50 According to official data, in 2011 circa five million
persons were provided with a form of social pension or attendance allow-
ance.51 As for childcare, particularly for c hildren from zero to three years
old, care services are mostly private and the number of caregivers is insuffi-
cient to respond to the needs of working families. Indeed, public childcare
(scuola materna) in Italy is provided for children aged three to six. It is
due to this void and/or insufficiency of public and affordable care services
for the elderly and for c hildren that non-western migrant workers occupy
a crucial role. In 2010 the National Institute for Social Insurance (inps)
counted 871,834 contracts for caregivers and h ousekeepers (domestiche, colf e
badanti), whereas estimates speak of more than one million workers being
employed in this sector, often informally, a large number of whom are mi
grants.52 The majority of non-Italian women employed in this sector come
from eastern Europe, although studies at the local levels show that women
from all regions of the Global South are well represented—particularly as
these are the only job opportunities they have in this country.53 No doubt,
the reasons non-western migrant women in particular have become so

important in Italian families, and why their number has grown so much
over the last twenty years, are both the lack of public care services and the
high costs of private ones, and the fact that outsourcing care work to migrant
women allows Italian families to maintain a family model and a gendered
division of tasks, as well as to save money, since migrants work longer hours
for very low salaries.54 The “migrant in the family model,” therefore, rep-
resents above all a cost-effective and gender-acceptable solution.55 Finally,
it is of crucial importance in the context of this study to note the role
played by immigration policies in encouraging the recruitment of Mus-
lim and non-western migrant women as care and domestic workers. In
2002 a new tough immigration law, the so-called Bossi-Fini Act—taking
its name from the then leaders of the ln and Alleanza Nazionale (National
Alliance), respectively, that is, the most vocal anti-immigration parties in
the government—was soon followed by regularization for care and do-
mestic workers. Despite the harsh restrictions on immigration included
in the new law, tellingly the ln declared its support for the regularization
of “all these extra-communitarians, the majority of whom are women,
who carry out activities of high social importance for families.”56 In 2005,
under Berlusconi’s neoliberal government, specific immigration quotas for
domestic and care workers were issued for the first time, allowing 15,000
domestic and care workers to enter the country: that is, the same number
established for all other occupations combined. In 2006 the same govern-
ment “allowed the entrance of another 45,000 domestic and care workers,
which was even more than the total (33,500) set for other occupations.”57
The tougher anti-immigration agenda of the new Berlusconi government
in 2008 resulted in a suspension of quotas for immigration, which was
presented as a response to the global economic crisis that had seemingly
made the recourse to migrant workers unnecessary. However, an excep-
tion was made for domestic and care workers, for whom a record quota of
105,400 was established. In 2009 the government therefore granted an am-
nesty only for illegal migrants working as carers (badanti), since that was
considered the only sector where the demand for l abor could not meet the
national supply. On this occasion, Roberto Maroni from the ln (then min-
ister of the Interior) again declared, “There cannot be a regularization for
those who entered illegally, for those who rape a woman or rob a villa, but
certainly we will take into account all those situations that have a strong
social impact, as in the case of [female] migrant care-givers.”58 Right-wing
anti-immigration parties such as the ln, thus, seem to be willing to close
an eye to undocumented migrants when they are women working in the
care and domestic sector.
As this brief overview of the situation in the three countries shows, the aging
of the population and the increasing participation of “native-born” women
164 Chapter 5
in the labor market in the last twenty years, which w ere followed neither
by a growth of public care services nor by changes in the sexual division of
labor within the household, have certainly been among the most impor
tant reasons for the growing demand for private carers and h ouseworkers,
and a powerful impetus for the feminization of contemporary migration
flows. Even in the case of Muslim women who are European citizens—as is
more often the case in France and the Netherlands than in Italy—care and
domestic work has become the main employing sector. While being more
often discriminated against and invited to take the veil off, Muslim w omen
are also increasingly pushed to take on jobs in social reproduction both
in order to fulfill the growing demand for carers and h ousekeepers and in
order to reduce their reliance on unemployment benefits. Yet beside this
set of phenomena Fiona Williams and Anna Gavanas also note that “it is
not simply the lack of public provision that shapes the demand for child-
care, but the very nature of state support that is available.”59 As we have
seen, state-arranged forms of cash provision or tax credits in the Nether-
lands, France, and Italy have been introduced in order to assist households
in buying help for elderly care, domestic work, and childcare. Both cash
provisions and tax credits have had the effect of encouraging the develop-
ment of the “commodification of care” and of domestic services, which are
generally sought privately on the market, where Muslim and non-western
migrant women provide the lion’s share of supply.60
In the current demographic and societal conjuncture, the role of the
state in the privatization of care services (which pushes families to look
for cost-effective solutions on the market), as well as the higher rates of
native-born women’s participation in paid employment—which often in-
volves them being obliged to find “gender-acceptable” replacements for
themselves in the household—are thus very important factors that can
help us explain why Muslim and non-western migrant women do not re-
ceive the same treatment as their male counterparts. Rather than “stealing
jobs,” “clashing culturally” and “parasitizing” on welfare provision, these
women are in fact the maids who help maintain the well-being of west-
ern European families and individuals. They are the providers of jobs and
welfare: they are those who, by helping western European w omen to undo
gender by substituting for them in the h ousehold, allow these “national”
women to become workers in the “productive” labor market. Furthermore,
it is they who contribute to the education of children and to the bodily
reproduction and emotional life of the elderly and disabled, thus provid-
ing the welfare goods from whose provision states increasingly retreat. It is
against this background that I propose that we can understand why Mus-
lim and non-western migrant women employed (or encouraged to be em-
ployed) in socially reproductive work are even offered exceptional help in
regularization processes (like in Italy) by nationalist parties that are other
wise harsh opponents of the influx of migrants.
However, in order to fully understand the role of female migrant l abor
within contemporary neoliberal western European societies, that is, in
order to explicate how its connotations as “socially reproductive” labor
enable us to shed light on the materiality or political-economic logic of
the femonationalist ideology, it is important to analyze what it is that dif-
ferentiates the care and domestic sector from other sectors that employ
mostly male migrants. In other words, we need to ask: Is there something
specific to care and domestic work that can account both for its current
feminized and racialized configuration and for the subtraction of Mus-
lim and non-western migrant w omen from the enemy camp constituted
mainly of migrant men?61 Is the foregrounding of t hese women as a tol-
erable component of the immigrant workforce qua (actual or potential)
care and domestic workers simply a contingent phenomenon, or is t here
something more stable and structural about their location in this newly
commodified sector of the economy? Do Muslim and non-western migrant
women employed in the domestic and care sector constitute a “reserve
army of labor” in the same way as migrant men do in western European
economies?
Peculiarities of Care and Domestic Labor, or Social

Reproduction: The Debate
Mainstream economists define care and domestic work, w hether per-

formed in private h ouseholds or in public institutions, as pertaining to the
service economy and therefore as labor-intensive and low in productiv-
ity.62 Like all human services, thus, care and domestic work is said to suffer
from William Baumol’s “costs disease,” which means that wages are inde
pendent of productivity and that profit margins are low.63 On the other
hand, most Marxist economists consider care and domestic work as re-
166 Chapter 5
productive labor—and thus as unproductive from a capitalist viewpoint—
inasmuch as it pertains to the sphere of production of “beings” and not of
“things,” or of “use values” rather than “exchange values.” But in spite of its
characterization by economists of different tendencies as a form of labor
that can be of greater or lesser significance from a capitalist perspective,
care and domestic work is a type of activity that societies simply cannot
do without. As reproductive labor, care and domestic work involves not
only the physical and emotional preservation and maintenance of work-
ers, elderly and the new generations, but also it is that type of l abor that is
fundamentally “constitutive of society’s reproduction” as a whole.64 Yet it
is precisely its status as socially reproductive labor that largely contributes
to the definition and societal perception of care and domestic work as
not being properly capitalist, that is, as fundamentally outside of market
relations.65 As Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez put it, the odd status of
social reproduction within industrial-dominated societies “has led not
only to the lack of its societal recognition and fair remuneration, but also
to the silencing of its societal contribution as ‘expanded reproduction’ ”
of capital.66 Against such a devaluation of domestic and care l abor, Marx-
ist feminists in the 1970s and 1980s in particular engaged in a “domestic
labor debate” and offered sophisticated critiques of orthodox economic
positions, seeking to demonstrate the key role of the h ousekeeper and the
caregiver for the perpetuation of capitalist social relations.67 As Mariarosa
Dalla Costa and Selma James argued in a famous intervention in 1972,
“Domestic labour is not essentially ‘feminine work’; a w oman doesn’t fulfill
herself more or get less exhausted than a man from washing and clean-
ing. These are social services inasmuch as they serve the reproduction
of labour power. And capital, precisely by instituting its f amily structure,
has ‘liberated’ the man from t hese functions so that he is completely ‘free’
for direct exploitation; so that he is free to ‘earn’ enough for a woman

to reproduce him as labour power.”68 In the 1980s the German feminist
group known as the Bielefelderinnen further elaborated on the notion of
reproductive labor as essential for capitalist accumulation.69 They sought
in particular to compare domestic and care work in the Global North and
subsistence agricultural work in the Global South in order to point to
these activities as the sources of the continuing original accumulation of
capital. Furthermore, they analyzed the relationship between the North
and the South, or the First and the Third World, in terms of the relation
between man and woman: “It is not women who have a colonial status,
but the colonies that have a woman’s status. In other words, the relation-
ship between the First and the Third World corresponds to the relationship
between man and woman.”70
All these contributions have been extremely important for an analysis
of the role of domestic and care labor in capitalist societies. They brought
to light the crucial economic and social importance of unpaid socially re-
productive work and the profoundly gendered essentialist assumptions that
underpinned it, thus demonstrating a central facet of the relation between
capitalism and patriarchy. Nonetheless, they were largely focused on the
housewife model in Fordist breadwinner systems, that is, on a model of
labor and social organization in which reproductive tasks were mostly done
by native-born w omen for free. Furthermore, the fundamental agreement
on the idea that unpaid care and domestic work was, strictly speaking, not
productive from a capitalist viewpoint (despite its importance for capitalist
reproduction at large) led to women in general being considered a privi-
leged source for the industrial reserve army of labor. As a category of labor
that did not depend entirely on a wage for its reproduction—insofar as the
assumption was that it could rely upon the male wage—married women in
particular in industrial western societies were automatically located among
the ranks of those sectors of the population that capitalists could call on
and off according to their needs.71 Finally, “the use of ‘woman’ as an undif-
ferentiated, essentialist, ahistorical and decontextualized identity category,”
as Gutiérrez-Rodríguez argues, following on Mohanty’s critique, tended
to omit “not only the inequalities between women, but also the dynamics
of an interlocking system of oppression.”72 What happens, then, when we
shift our focus to socially reproductive labor that is undertaken in a paid
form and by migrant/non-western women? Can we apply to it the same

categories used to analyze socially reproductive labor undertaken in un-
paid form by non-migrant/western w omen at home? And how does this
shift help us further clarify that “state of exception” enjoyed by Muslim and
non-western migrant women as “redeemable subjects” in the landscape of
otherwise stigmatized and undesired Muslim and migrant male workers in
the present conjuncture?
168 Chapter 5
The Affectivity, Spatial Fixity, and Noncyclical Nature of Paid,
Socially Reproductive Work
Even in its paid form, the care and domestic sector remains perhaps the
most “gendered labor market.” Not only b ecause the bulk of the workforce
employed in the sector is female, but also b ecause specifically female con-
structions of femininity have been enduringly associated with it and, there-
fore, have been constitutive elements in the formation of its skills, working
culture, and identity.73 Furthermore, as Helma Lutz argues, domestic and
care work “is not just another labour market.”74 Namely, it is not
merely work, but a particular gendered activity. As a gendered activity

it is emotionally and morally linked to meanings and interpretations of
who we are as w omen and men and who we wish to be. In other words,
domestic work as a core activity of doing gender, helps perpetuate the
existing social order of the genders. . . . Outsourcing household and
care work to another woman is widely accepted because it follows and
perpetuates the logic of gender display in accordance with institutional-
ized genderisms.75
Besides being historically and culturally constructed as a gendered ac-

tivity that strongly relies on “interpellating and performing ‘femininity,’ ”
a fundamental, albeit not exclusive, component of care and domestic, or
socially reproductive, labor is also affectivity.76 To grasp this aspect, some
authors have proposed a distinction in the set of tasks characterizing care
and domestic work between “caring for”—which includes more physical
chores such as cooking, cleaning, and washing—and “caring about,” which
entails the relational side of child-minding and elderly care.77 In this vein,
feminist scholars in diverse fields of the social sciences and the humanities
coined new categories to account for the distinctive affective components

so strongly constitutive of paid social reproduction: that is, “sex/affective
labor,” “emotional surplus value,” “maternal labor,” and so forth.78 Each
category in its own way points to the incapacity of orthodox economics
and mainstream quantitative frameworks in the fields of migration stud-
ies, economics, and sociology to comprehend the complex interlocking of
cultural, ideological, and political significations that contribute to the con-
struction and preservation of care and domestic work as a peculiar type
of gendered and affective labor, even in its commodified form. However,
the recognition of the highly emotional character of some of the tasks in-
volved in care and domestic work should not mislead us into thinking that
here we are always necessarily dealing with “positive” affects. The affects
involved in the context of care and domestic labor performed at home
in paid form may assume different meanings for the employee and the
employer. For the former (the migrant women in this case), feelings such
as love for the c hildren she looks a fter, affection for the elderly person she
cares for, or sympathy for a good employer she might be lucky to have,
can go hand in hand with “disgust,” “unhappiness,” and “servility.” This re-
minds us that, as Gutiérrez-Rodríguez puts it, “affects are not free-floating
energies. They emerge in a space delimited by a concrete historical and
geopolitical context, bearing traces of the materiality that they transcend
through their energy, but in which they remain embedded through their
context of emergence. The expression and transmission of affects, thus,
occur in a space marked by historically produced, socially configured and
culturally located power relations.”79 On the other hand, the feelings the
employer might attach to care and domestic work can be of a completely
different sort. Particularly for the female employer, the outsourcing of care
and domestic work to another w oman means above all “relief ” from tasks
that would otherwise be likely to fall upon her shoulders. “As feminised
subjects, both women . . . are objects of the social revulsion projected onto
domestic work. . . . Nonetheless, the employment of another woman to do
the work releases the female employers from negative affect so they have
the opportunity to feel happy within their own four walls.”80
The reliance of households upon work imbued with such important
affects—especially from the employer’s viewpoint—and the very fact that
this work is linked to family necessities that cannot be suspended, have
important implications for explaining why the state abstains from punish-
ing the hiring of irregular migrants in private households and even makes
exceptions for its regularization. In some cases, it can also explain why
migrant women employed as domestic workers might sometimes have
bargaining power over their wages—in spite of the terrible working condi-
tions that characterize this sector. The intimate nature of the context in
which it is performed (the household), the highly emotional character of
the tasks involved (caring for c hildren and/or the elderly, cooking, looking
after the home, i.e., the employer’s nest of intimacy par excellence), and
170 Chapter 5
therefore the importance of trust in the relationship, are all aspects that
have been reported to make it difficult for employers to replace the worker
once a relation of reliance is in place. For instance, empirical qualitative re-
search carried out in the Netherlands shows that it is not infrequent to find
undocumented migrants working in the household services sector who
have bargaining power in setting the terms of their employment.81 Like-
wise, some of the migrant women employed as care and domestic workers
whom I interviewed in Rome in 2003 and 2005 spoke of how they could
recommend their own replacement, either temporarily or permanently, on
the basis of the relation of trust that they had created.82
Crucially, the affective character of care and domestic labor is also one
of the core difficulties encountered by attempts to automate it. Research
carried out in several eu member-states shows that while public spending
starts to be directed more and more toward assistive technology in the
form of devices provided to the elderly and dependent persons for free,
with the aim of saving on hospitalization and national health labor costs,
many elderly people nonetheless prefer either to buy costly equipment
privately or to avoid it altogether. In recent years various tech companies,
including French, Italian, and Dutch ones (Aldebaran Robotics, ArTec
Domotica, Frog agv Systems), have e ither invested in or developed so-
called nursebots, that is, robotic assistance for the elderly and disabled.
Nevertheless, research shows that robotic devices cannot substitute for
human interaction and care. On the contrary, the deployment of these ro-
bots in nursing homes has had detrimental effects on the psychological
state of dependent persons, particularly as such devices have been often
perceived as signs of a lack of care.83 This is ultimately due to the fact that,
as Silvia Federici points out,
unlike commodity production, the reproduction of h uman beings is to

a great extent irreducible to mechanization, being the satisfaction of

complex needs, in which physical and affective elements are inextri-
cably combined, requiring a high degree of human interaction and a
most labor-intensive process. This is most evident in the reproduction
of children and the elderly that even in its most physical component in-
volves providing a sense of security, anticipating fears and desires. None
of t hese activities is purely “material” or “immaterial,” nor can they be
broken down in ways making it possible for them to be mechanized or
replaced by the virtual world of online communication.84
Two further elements should be considered in addressing the differ-

ences between (paid and unpaid) care and domestic work and other sec-
tors employing male migrants. First, the need for proximity between the
producer and consumer of care and domestic services, or what I call their
spatial fixity, the impossibility of suspending them, or their noncyclical na-
ture, as well as the fact that these services must be consumed immediately
after, or during, their production make the interruption and “the physical
relocation of production away from the site of final consumption (as in
commodity production) (practically) impossible.”85 Second, the fact that
a significant portion of care and domestic migrant workers are employed
by private h ouseholds that pay the worker either through cash provisions
made available by the state or through their own savings means that we are
not in the presence of a typical capitalist labor relation. At least in princi
ple, the employer does not extract surplus value from the worker’s surplus
labor in order to invest it in fixed capital or make a profit.86 By pointing to
this peculiarity I aim to show that labor relations between employer and
employee in the context of care and domestic work in private h ouseholds
might not always be best described in terms of capitalist labor relations, as
might instead be the case for other sectors that tend to employ male mi
grants (above all, manufacturing).
All in all, the fact that the affective character of the work involved in
labor-intensive services such as the care and domestic sector makes it dif-
ficult to automate, together with its spatial fixity, noncyclical character,
and “relative” subtraction from pure capitalist relations, is an important
dimension helping account for both its dissimilarity from unpaid social
reproduction and its peculiarity as compared to sectors employing mostly
migrant men. Combined with all the factors mentioned above—that is,
the aging of the population, the increasing participation of native-born
women in paid employment outside the h ousehold, and the commodifi-
cation and privatization of care as the preferred response of most west-
ern European states facing increasing demands for ltc provision—these
elements peculiar to paid care and domestic work can further enable us
to understand why the demand for migrant women as care and domestic
workers is on the rise.
172 Chapter 5
Are Muslim and Non-Western Migrant Women a Regular
Army of Labor?
One of the consequences deriving from the peculiarities of commodified

care and domestic work that I illustrated above is not only that it has been
mostly redistributed onto the shoulders of migrant women, but also that it is
one of t hose sectors where the Marxian notion of the reserve army of labor
needs amending. As I argued at the beginning of this chapter, the discussion
of the creation of a surplus-laboring population, or reserve army, is strictly
related to Marx’s analysis of the organic composition of capital and the ten-
dency of capitalist accumulation to encourage the increase “of its constant,
at the expense of its variable constituent,” namely, the increase of the mass
and value of the means of production at the cost of the mass and value of
living labor employed in the production process.87 The reduction of variable
capital can be achieved either through automation, which reduces the mass
of workers and, therefore, leads to their expulsion from the productive pro
cess, or through the reduction of the value of variable capital (that is, wages),
which can result either in capitalists hiring layers of the unemployed and
underemployed populations who work for lower wages, or in the relocation
of production to poorer areas with cheap labor and poor labor regulation.
However, none of t hese conditions seem to apply to the paid care and
domestic work undertaken by female migrant workers in contemporary
western European societies. The resistance of care and domestic labor to
automation, its “spatial fixity,” noncyclical nature, and very poor working
conditions, coupled with the societal and demographic trends I illustrated
in the previous section, mean that (1) only a small amount of commodified
care and domestic labor can be decommodified through redistribution
onto the shoulders of family members; (2) competition—whether real or
virtual—between national and non-national laborers for these jobs is not

significant; and (3) care and domestic work cannot be replaced by fixed
capital (machines) or relocated.
First, the possibility of resorting to members of family households for
free care and domestic labor, and thus of decommodifying it by returning to
the male breadwinner and housewife model typical of Fordism, is increas-
ingly ruled out by important developments that have taken place in the struc-
ture of western European economies particularly since the 1990s. Whereas
women were traditionally the family members in charge of reproductive
tasks in the h ousehold, their increased participation in the labor market
in the last twenty years has led to important changes in traditional gender
roles and family structures, and consequently in w omen’s availability to
provide care and domestic work in the same conditions. Data from Euro-
stat show an increase of 7.6 percentage points in the activity rate of native-
born western European women between 2000 and 2012, from a share of
61.8 percent women active in the labor market in the second quarter of
2000 to 69.4 percent in the third quarter of 2012. As shown in figure 5.2
and as a recent study on the impact of the global economic crisis on native-
born women confirms, these w omen have also been less affected by the
crisis than native-born men. 88
Women’s increasing integration in paid work has been reinforced both

by changes in family models and by the increasing importance of women’s
wages in family budgets. Most important, data show that native-born
“women’s response to the demand downturn has been primarily to rein-
force their commitment to the labor market through added worker effects.
Women are thus not acting as a buffer either in protecting men against
job loss or acting as a labour reserve in voluntarily withdrawing from the
l abour market.”89 This testifies to a societal shift that has been taking place
across western European countries—although at different speeds in each
country—toward a growing member of the female working-aged popula-
tion being active in the workforce. Such a shift has meant that w omen have
less time, availability, and (often) willingness to accomplish the care and
domestic tasks that traditionally awaited them at home.
Second, the poor working conditions, low wages and low status, unso-
cial working hours, and often irregular situations prevalent in the care and
domestic sector make this work unattractive for nonmigrant women. Fur-
thermore, research shows that employers themselves often prefer to hire
migrants as care and domestic workers. Not only are they seen as being
more available for low-status and low-paid jobs than native-born workers,
but also when the latter do accept jobs as in-home nannies, for instance,
they are discussed in negative terms as representing poor “national” role mod-
els for the c hildren due to their (often) low education levels, unlike migrant
women who frequently have high-level qualifications.90 Additionally, the
creation of niches within the care and domestic sectors—for instance,
between live-in and live-out jobs—divided according to nationality, cou-
pled with the rising demand for care and domestic workers even in times
174 Chapter 5
Extra-EU15
5.5
8.1
2.7
EU-15
3.4
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Women Men variation 2007–2011(%)
Figure 5.2 Difference in unemployment rates between 2007 and 2011 by sex

and country of birth in the eu-15. source: calculations based on eurostat,
labour force survey (online data code: [lfsa_urgacob]).
of economic crisis and austerity, seems to have created a certain equilib-

rium between female migrant workers themselves, so that they tend not to
compete for the same jobs.
Third, as I explained earlier, the attempts to automate care and domestic
work, or replace workers with fixed capital (machines), are made par-
ticularly difficult by the strong affective dimensions of this work, thereby
rendering certain tasks impossible to mechanize. Relocation to sites with
cheaper labor is also impossible due to the very nature of care and do-
mestic services, which have to be produced and consumed in situ, most
often at home. This is the case not only because the home is obviously the
site of housekeeping, but also because the expectations and preferences of
families and dependent persons with regard to care—as well as those of
the state—are not shifting away from a largely “care-at-home” model. Most
p
eople requiring ltc services receive and prefer to receive care at home.91
For instance, a 2007 Eurobarometer survey examining public opinion re-

garding care provision across Europe found that the large majority of in-
terviewees expressed the expectation of and preference for home care if
they were to become dependent.92 However, the increased participation
of native-born women in the workforce and the fact that they have been
less affected by unemployment than native-born men (in other words, the
fact that the crisis has not created a supply of native-born women for the
care and domestic sector, at least in the richer regions of these countries)
have meant that these expectations and preferences can less and less be met
by a native-born female workforce that is increasingly active outside the
household, determined to remain so, and unavailable (or undesirable) for
care and domestic work even in paid form, due above all to the very severe,
unregulated, stigmatized, and poor working conditions of this sector.
It is thus not by chance that the 2007–2011 economic downturn hit par-
ticularly hard the sectors that employ migrant men, whereas those em-
ploying migrant women have even grown during the crisis. As the 2012
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (oecd) Inter-
national Migration Outlook reports, in the eu the crisis was felt in very se-
vere ways by t hose sectors that are highly exposed to the fluctuations of the
economy. In contrast, noncyclical sectors registered significant growth with
occupations like “residential care activities” and “activities of h ouseholds
as employers of domestic personnel” registering thousands of new jobs for
foreign-born workers, most of them for women. In light of this evidence,
the oecd did not fail to emphasize that in most countries migrant women
have been less affected by the economic crisis than migrant men.93 For in-
stance, data on the effects of the global economic crisis in the Netherlands
in 2012 show that while employment in the construction and manufactur-
ing industries decreased by 4 percent and 13 percent, respectively, thereby
affecting foreign-born (young) males in particular, it grew by 40 percent
in the care and welfare sector, which is envisaged to be one of the faster-
growing sectors in the Dutch economy in the coming years.94 In France
too, manufacturing and construction were the sectors that most suffered
from the economic downturn, with losses between 2008 and 2011 amount-
ing to 44,400 jobs in the construction sector and 267,600 in manufacturing
and extractive industries.95 On the other hand, according to the Conseil
National de l’Information Statistique (cnis; National Council for Statisti-
cal Information), the number of people employed under the cesu scheme
grew from 770,000 persons in 2008 to 835,000 in 2010.96 Although there

are not detailed statistics on the nationality or country of birth of these
workers, estimates calculate that more than one in four care and domestic
workers are of foreign nationality and 35 percent are immigrants.97 Finally,
in Italy, given the crucial role that migrant w
omen working as caregivers
and housekeepers are playing in the Italian family system (particularly in
the north of the country and in the big cities), it is little surprise to dis-
cover that the global economic crisis has impacted males dramatically, but
not so much female migrant workers. Not only has the care and domes-
176 Chapter 5
tic sector been spared from the devastating effects of the crisis, but it has
even grown during it, although we should bear in mind that such growth
has also meant an expansion of the gray economy and worsening working
conditions in the sector.98 As all available data clearly show, thus, the global
economic crisis has had specific gender dimensions, particularly for mi
grant workers. As previously noted, some commentators have gone so far
as to call it the “he-cession.”99
In light of these elements, I argue that the female migrant workforce
employed in the care and domestic sector in western Europe amounts not
to a reserve army that is depicted (and perceived) as an economic threat
to native-born workers, constantly exposed to unemployment and used in
order to maintain wage discipline, but to a “regular” army of labor. Rather
than being competitors with native women in the low-skilled jobs market,
migrant w omen employed as care and domestic workers thus have both al-
lowed a number of native-born women to work outside the household, and
created entirely new professional figures, such as that of the paid personal
badante, which in Italy, for instance, had not previously existed. Rather
than inspiring campaigns for their exclusion from the labor market, or
from western Europe altogether, non-western migrant w omen undergo
exceptional processes of regularization and even receive offers of “salva-
tion” from their allegedly backward cultures.
The proposal that migrant women employed as care and domestic
workers could be characterized as a regular army of labor thus appears to
run counter to the so-called domestic labor debate initiated by feminists in
the late 1970s and 1980s. As noted above, in this context the concept of the
reserve army of labor was used in order to account for the structural in-
come biases and precarious working and contractual conditions of w omen
who were then entering the labor market as waged workers in increasing
numbers.100 As Floya Anthias noted, it had become “an almost unproblem-

atic reference to depict w omen as a ral [reserve army of labor],” particu-
larly in Marxist feminist discussions.101 However, rather than challenging
the idea that w omen in general are likely to be counted in the ranks of the
(latent) reserve army of l abor—a hypothesis that at any rate would need to
be empirically verified in each country and at different times and stages of
capitalist development—I propose instead that we employ the notion of
the regular army to describe what happens to migrant w omen engaged in
commodified socially reproductive labor. The focus on a specific category
of “women” in the context of contemporary neoliberal western European
societies as well as on a determined (and highly peculiar) sector of the
economy enables us to see that the w omen to whom the two concepts
refer—reserve army in the 1970s and regular army in the 2000s—do not
belong to the same supposedly homogeneous universal called woman-
hood. Rather, they inhabit diverse worlds of experience strongly marked
by class and (increasingly) racial differences. Insofar as the w omen who
are employed in the care and domestic sector are migrants mainly coming
from the Global South and former state-socialist countries, the most ap-
propriate term for understanding their working conditions is arguably nei-
ther the indeterminate abstraction of wage labor in general, nor of women’s
work in particular, but rather the determinate abstraction of commodified
socially reproductive work carried out by the migrant workforce.
Migrant labor in contemporary Europe and western societies, as I
have previously argued, is configured in specific forms: it is “labor on the
move,” as a result of the uneven development brought about by what David
Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession,” and it is “disposable labor,”
with a distinctive economic as well as political status.102 However, in the
world of migrant workers, migrant women’s labor seems to obey its own
rules. It follows the rules of genderism and the “sexual contract” within the
household, which establishes that women are still the subjects in charge
of reproduction and care.103 But it also follows the rules of the “racial con-
tract,” according to which ethnic minorities and p eople of color are still
those who perform the least desirable and valued tasks in a society.104 The
concept of a regular army of labor as applied to migrant women employed
in commodified socially reproductive work in contemporary western Eu
ropean societies thus aims to contribute to the Marxist theory of the re-
serve army of labor, which, as I argued above, is still of enormous value
for understanding the place of migrant labor in contemporary western Eu

ropean societies. Hence, I regard the concept of the regular army of labor
as a possible supplement to the Marxian theory of surplus populations, a
supplement potentially enabling that theory not only to take into account
the notoriously neglected field of socially reproductive labor, but also to
understand its changing forms under neoliberal capitalism.
The term “regular,” however, can be misleading if it is taken to mean sta-
bility and security. I should thus clarify that by using such a term I do not
intend to assert that female migrants could not in principle belong to a re-
178 Chapter 5
serve army of labor or that they are immune from unemployment and the
loss of social and political rights. On the contrary, migrant w
omen from
the Global South often go through a process of incorporation into and
expulsion from wage labor in their sending countries before they move to
richer regions in the North.105 In other words, they may well belong to their
national reserve army of labor as rural migrants or as a cheaper workforce
alternatively hired and fired by industries in their own country as capi
talist needs demand. Furthermore, we could imagine a f uture scenario in
which for different reasons native-born w omen will become available for
paid reproductive work, thereby potentially turning migrant women em-
ployed in the sector into reserve rather than regular workers. Likewise, I
do not mean to suggest that migrant women employed in the care and do-
mestic sector have more regulated, secure, or simply better working con-
ditions than their male counterparts employed in other sectors. As most
studies on this particular segment of the labor market demonstrate, care
and domestic jobs are often performed in unsafe contexts, without con-
tract regulations or health and social benefits and in very abusive working
conditions.106
By employing the term “regular army,” I seek to show how the Marxist
tradition’s use of the powerful metaphor of an “army” to describe the pool
of workers and surplus populations in industrialized societies has a con
temporary relevance and explanatory power. But I also seek to underline
the antipodal position occupied by the female segment of migrant workers
active in this specific economic sector as contrasted to the “reserve” char-
acter of the army of labor in which the male segment is mostly employed.
My proposal, in this respect, might be seen as close to the perspective more
recently a dopted by Saskia Sassen, who has characterized low-waged do-
mestic workers as “strategic infrastructure maintenance workers.”107 As
Sassen highlights, though research on the subject has focused on the “poor
working conditions, exploitation, and multiple vulnerabilities of these
ousehold workers,” what matters analytically “is the strategic importance
h
of well-functioning professional households for the leading globalized
sectors in [the] cities and, hence, the importance of this new type of serv-
ing class,” which is mostly composed of women.108
Furthermore, by introducing the concept of a regular army of labor for
migrant women employed in the care and domestic sector in western
Europe, I also seek to rethink and to interrogate established categories
inherited from past debates, such as the assumption that both w omen and
migrants constitute, almost by definition, a reserve army of labor.109 By
showing the epochal shifts under way in important societal domains (par-
ticularly the family and the gender patterns traditionally associated with
it), in their intersections with the changes taking place in labor markets
(where women, both native and foreign-born, have been hit by the crisis
less than men), migration regimes, and state policies regarding care (which
fuel the demand for migrant women in the care sector), we can appreciate
how such shifts have come to overturn our expectations and how they can
push us to update our analytical toolbox.
Notes toward a Critique of the Political Economy

of Femonationalism
As this long discussion has sought to demonstrate, a critique of the politi

cal economy of femonationalism entails an in-depth analysis of the wider
economic interests that have contributed to shape femonationalism into
one of the most puzzling and powerful ideological formations of our times.
The materiality of discourses and ideologies is linked to the ways in which
they operate through different (state) apparatuses in order to guarantee the
reproduction of the material conditions of production on a daily basis. I
thus contend that the materiality of femonationalism is strictly connected
to the ways in which the foregrounding of Muslim and non-western migrant
women as redeemable, even within campaigns dominated by otherwise
harsh anti-immigration slogans, is related to their key role in the repro-
duction of the material conditions of social reproduction. The “useful” role
that female migrant labor plays in the contemporary restructuring of wel-
fare regimes and the feminization of key sectors of the service economy
thus accounts significantly for the different ways in which neoliberal gov-
ernments and nationalist parties relate to Muslim and non-western migrant
women and men.
We could further note that, besides being extremely useful “reproductive
workers,” Muslim and non-western migrant women are also “reproductive
bodies” whose birthrate is more than double that of national women.110
Despite the attempts “to re-establish the demographic advantage of one
nationality”—as Judith Butler put it—that have been made in the last few
years by several eu countries (see chapter 2), calls for assimilation addressed
180 Chapter 5
to non-western migrant women (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) identify a
specific role they play within contemporary western European societies.111 In-
sofar as they are regarded as prolific bodies of future generations, as m others
who play a crucial role in the process of transmission of “societal values,” as a
useful replacement in the socially reproductive sector for “national” women,
migrant women seem to become the target of a deceptively benevolent cam-
paign in which they are “needed” as workers, “tolerated” as migrants, and
“encouraged” as w omen to conform to western values.
Two further elements should be considered in these concluding re-
marks, albeit briefly. Attending to women’s specific positioning within the
circuit of the market economy is important for a critique of femonationalism
not only in terms of the role of w omen as producers and reproducers, but
also when we consider them as consumers and even as commodities. As
Hester Eisenstein argues, “If the goal of globalization is to create invest-
ment and marketing opportunities, and therefore acceptance of western
products along with western norms, then in this context an image of a
liberated western woman becomes part of the sale. . . . Feminism, defined
as women’s liberation from patriarchal constraints, is made the equivalent
of participating in the market as a liberated individual.”112 Continuous
capitalist expansion in the Global South as well as the full incorporation
of all individuals into its logic in the richer North involves an extension
and rearticulation of the ideology that Crawford Macpherson famously
called “possessive individualism.”113 As possessive individuals, migrants
integrated into western societies—and particularly female migrants—are
invited to conceive of their freedom in terms of their independence from
communitarian boundaries and of their capacity for endless western pat-
terns of consumption.
Migrant w omen, however, are also commodities. H ere, by considering
contemporary femonationalism as an ideological formation that needs to be

understood also on the basis of the commodification of Muslim and non-
western w omen as such, I am arguing that we need to pursue the line of rea-
soning famously proposed by Alain Badiou more than a decade ago. After
the 2004 law against the hijab in public schools was approved in France—a
law that has come to epitomize the entire debate about the equation be-
tween Islam and w omen’s oppression—the French philosopher defined it
as a “pure capitalist law.” For femininity to operate according to its function
under capitalism, the female body has to be exposed in order to circulate
“according to the market paradigm.”114 The Muslim girl therefore has to
show “what she’s got to sell.” In other words, she needs to accept and to en-
dorse actively the commodification of her female body. The emphasis on the
need of assimilating migrant women in general to norms of European femi-
ninity, or on the unveiling of Muslim women in particular, therefore com-
bines both the western male’s enduring dream of “uncovering” the w oman
of the e nemy, or of the colonized, and the demand to end the incongru-
ence of hidden female bodies as exceptions to the general law according to
which they should circulate like “sound currency.”115
We can thus argue that the current mobilization of gender equality and
feminism as tools in the service of the strengthening of nationalist and
racist discourses should be regarded not simply as “ideological cover,” in a
negative and limited sense, as a distortion or lie. The rise of femonational-
ism needs to be deciphered also as symptomatic of the distinctive position
of western and non-western women in the economic, political, and sensu
lato material chain of production and reproduction. The possibility of the
attempted appropriation by nationalist and neoliberal discourses of central
feminist ideals of equality and freedom, and the convergence of feminists/
femocrats with anti-immigration and racist politics, has emerged from the
very specific reconfiguration of the labor market, migration, and work-
force movements as well as the nationalization of political life produced by
the dynamics of neoliberal globalization of the last thirty years. Confront-
ing femonationalism thus requires not only ideological refutation but also
a concrete analysis of its political-economic foundations.
182 Chapter 5

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CHAPTER 5

The Po­liti­cal Economy of Femonationalism

In their introduction to Global ­Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers

Figure 5.1 ​Foreign-­born immigrant population by sex in the eu-15 in 2010.

Rather, it should be taken quite literally: poor countries increasingly pro-

close to half in all other countries (figure 5.1).3

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 147

son for the feminization of international migration.10

underpinning femonationalism has been largely overlooked. However, a

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 149

Mi­grants as a Reserve Army of ­Labor

­labor pro­cess that cannot be entirely replaced by machines. This is one of

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 151

velopment, of cap­i­tal­ist expansion in pre­industrial socie­ties, and of the

concept of a “reserve army” to describe the condition of mi­grant work-

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 153

easily extended to other western Eu­ro­pean contexts, the concept of a reserve

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 155

In this context, the significant rise of right-­wing nationalist parties cam-

Female Migration and the Commodification of Care

As I began to illustrate in the introduction to this chapter, Muslim and

of foreign-­born ­women in the sector, ­these data tend to be mostly “con-

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 157

Care–­domestic Residential care and Ser­vices to

Created from nyulibrary-ebooks on 2022-01-23 23:00:09.

in the near f­uture. Institutional rearrangements occurring in the el­derly

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 159

work as an informal and hidden sector where undocumented and unpro-

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 161

with discrimination and racism in other types of employment.48

the reasons non-­western mi­grant ­women in par­tic­u­lar have become so

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 163

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 165

Peculiarities of Care and Domestic ­Labor, or Social

Mainstream economists define care and domestic work, w ­ hether per-

for direct exploitation; so that he is ­free to ‘earn’ enough for a ­woman

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 167

form and by migrant/non-­western ­women? Can we apply to it the same

merely work, but a par­tic­u­lar gendered activity. As a gendered activity

Besides being historically and culturally constructed as a gendered ac-

coined new categories to account for the distinctive affective components

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 169

unlike commodity production, the reproduction of h ­ uman beings is to

a ­great extent irreducible to mechanization, being the satisfaction of

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 171

Two further ele­ments should be considered in addressing the differ-

One of the consequences deriving from the peculiarities of commodified

virtual—­between national and non-­national laborers for ­these jobs is not

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 173

­Women’s increasing integration in paid work has been reinforced both

Figure 5.2 ​Difference in unemployment rates between 2007 and 2011 by sex

of economic crisis and austerity, seems to have created a certain equilib-

For instance, a 2007 Eurobarometer survey examining public opinion re-

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 175

grew from 770,000 persons in 2008 to 835,000 in 2010.96 Although ­there

numbers.100 As Floya Anthias noted, it had become “an almost unproblem-

The Po­l iti­c al Economy of Femonationalism 177

for understanding the place of mi­grant ­labor in con­temporary western Eu­

The Political Economy of Femonationalism

In their introduction to Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers

Figure 5.1 Foreign-born immigrant population by sex in the eu-15 in 2010.

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 147

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 149

Migrants as a Reserve Army of Labor

labor process that cannot be entirely replaced by machines. This is one of

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 151

velopment, of capitalist expansion in preindustrial societies, and of the

concept of a “reserve army” to describe the condition of migrant work-

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 153

easily extended to other western European contexts, the concept of a reserve

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 155

In this context, the significant rise of right-wing nationalist parties cam-

of foreign-born women in the sector, these data tend to be mostly “con-

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 157

Care–domestic Residential care and Services to

in the near future. Institutional rearrangements occurring in the elderly

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 159

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 161

the reasons non-western migrant women in particular have become so

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 163

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 165

Peculiarities of Care and Domestic Labor, or Social

Mainstream economists define care and domestic work, w hether per-

for direct exploitation; so that he is free to ‘earn’ enough for a woman

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 167

form and by migrant/non-western women? Can we apply to it the same

merely work, but a particular gendered activity. As a gendered activity

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 169

unlike commodity production, the reproduction of h uman beings is to

a great extent irreducible to mechanization, being the satisfaction of

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 171

Two further elements should be considered in addressing the differ-

virtual—between national and non-national laborers for these jobs is not

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 173

Women’s increasing integration in paid work has been reinforced both

Figure 5.2 Difference in unemployment rates between 2007 and 2011 by sex

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 175

grew from 770,000 persons in 2008 to 835,000 in 2010.96 Although there

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 177

for understanding the place of migrant labor in contemporary western Eu

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 179

Notes toward a Critique of the Political Economy

As this long discussion has sought to demonstrate, a critique of the politi

contemporary femonationalism as an ideological formation that needs to be

The Pol itic al Economy of Femonationalism 181