Intimacy and inequality; conceptualising care labour in Kenya

Mon 23 February 2015

Alison Richard Building

Over a decade ago, in her influential paper Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value, Hochschild introduced the idea of ‘global care chains’ to feminist studies of care work and emotional labour. Taking global statistics on migration and the feminisation of labour as her starting point, Hochschild examined the role of migrant women as an essential component of today’s global care chains and explored what she described as a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring. The expansion, increasing significance and global characteristics of care work are now widely recognised. Whilst the global care chain debate has been instructive – it has spawned both valuable theoretical insights and important empirical studies, ranging from the experience of illegality of migrant Basotho women workers in South Africa to men’s contribution to global care work – I will argue in this paper that its analytical focus on the global may have limited our investigations into and understanding of more common, localised forms of care.

Cost: free