Very little scholarship exists, which investigates male domestic workers. Yet they constitute a highly interesting vantage point from which to analyze the gendered and racialized division of labor as well as the social constructions of masculinity in both contemporary societies and in the past. In several countries nowadays a large number of domestic workers are migrants. By focusing on men employed as domestic workers in different societies, in both the global North and the global South (Italy, France, United Kingdom, India, Ivory Coast, and Congo), the articles presented in this special issue investigate the gendered dimensions of globalization and international migration, while avoiding the essentialist association of ‘‘gender’’ with ‘‘women.’’ They cover a wide range of disciplines (sociology, anthropology, and history) and methodologies (both qualitative and quantitative). Despite this variety of themes and approaches, all identify domestic service as a site where ‘‘hegemonic’’ and ‘‘subaltern’’ masculinities are produced and negotiated at the interplay of multiple social relations. Therefore, they contribute to filling a gap in the recent scholarship about migrant domestic and care labor. Investigating male domestic workers’ practices and the social construction of masculinity within domestic service from the late nineteenth century to the current day, this special issue illustrates not only geographical but also historical variations

Based on qualitative data, this article focuses on management practices in social cooperatives operating as non-profit providers of domiciliary care services in Italy. Their livelihood is eroded by the presence of migrant live-in care-givers, who are privately employed, inexpensive and often irregular. This competition is not only economic but also symbolic, as it jeopardises the managers' attempts to define care work as a skilled job and reproduces notions of care as naturally feminine 'women's work'. The article analyses the strategies adopted by the managers in order to negotiate this competition, and shows how these challenge dominant gendered constructions of care work.

This article, based on semi-structured interviews, addresses masculinity in the international division of reproductive labour through an analysis of the impact of gender and class on the outsourcing of elderly care services to migrant care workers. In the Italian context, characterised by a limited provision of long-term care services and by cash-for-care benefits, the strategies of men as employers of migrant care workers are shaped by class and gender. The outsourcing of care to migrant workers reproduces hegemonic masculinity in so far as male employers are able to withdraw from the ‘dirty work’. At the same time, men engage with tasks which are, in principle, kept at a distance. The employers’ family status, combined with their class background, are crucial factors in shaping the heterogeneity of men’s experiences as employers and managers of care labour, and the ways in which they make sense of their masculinity.

Drawing on ethnographic data concerning migrant male domestic workers, this article examines the gendered dimensions of the process of racialization in Italy and France. First, it shows that specific racialized constructions of masculinity are mobilized by the employers as well as by training and recruitment agencies. These constructions of masculinity are related to different forms of organization of the sector in each country and to different ideologies about the integration of migrants. Second, the data presented reveal the strategies used by migrant male domestic workers to reaffirm their masculinity in a traditionally feminized sector. In doing so, this article intends to explore the connections between international migration and the gendering of occupations, with regard to the construction and management of masculinities in domestic service. Finally, by examining men's experiences, this article aims to contribute to a more complex definition of the international division of care work.

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