New Global Politics of Reproductive Labor: Gendered Labor and Marriage Migration

The feminization of international migration nowadays has demonstrated a new global politics of reproductive labor (work necessary for the reproduction of families). This paper reviews recent studies that manifest similarity, affinity, and continuity across multiple forms of reproductive labor carried out by migrant women in four aspects. First, the recruitment of women as foreign maids or foreign brides provides class-specific parallel strategies to the global care crisis. Second, paid and unpaid forms of reproductive labor constitute intersecting circuits of labor and marriage migration through which women partake in continuous migration. Third, various categories of migrant women are discursively conflated and attached to similar images as sexualized others. Finally, global care chains not only involve migrant reproductive labor conducted at home but also operate on the level of social reproduction as indicated by the expansion of international nursing migration.