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This article argues that international nurse recruitment from Latvia to Norway is not a win–win situation. The gains and losses of nurse migration are unevenly distributed between sender and receiver countries. On the basis of empirical research and interviews with Latvian nurses and families they left behind, this article argues that nurse migration transforms families and communities and that national health services now become global workplaces. Some decades ago feminist research pointed to the fact that the welfare state was based on a male breadwinner family and women’s unpaid production of care work at home. Today this production of unpaid care is “outsourced” from richer to poorer countries and is related to an emergence of transnational spaces of care. International nurse recruitment and global nurse care chains in Norway increasingly provide the labor that prevents the new adult worker model and gender equality politics from being disrupted in times where families are overloaded with elder care loads.

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Based on a reinterpretation of 105 relations between the elderly and their adult children, this article discusses incontinence as a social and cultural phenomenon. Social norms and cultural symbols that surround the intimate parts of the body affect the way care work is organized, gendered, culturally understood, and socially stratified. To lose bodily control over bodily fluids seems to put the individual's identity and human dignity at risk. The disturbing presence of odors, sights, and textures seems to have a disruptive effect on close relationships. The article further discusses how bodily dimensions of care add new burdens to modern family life in different social contexts and contribute to expand the gender gap in different cultures of care. This seems to be related to how ideas of individualism structure and are structured by economic and social conditions in which people live their everyday lives.

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