This article examines the complexity of feminized domestic labor in the context of global migration. I view unpaid household labor and paid domestic work not as dichotomous categories but as structural continuities across the public and private spheres. Based on a qualitative study of Filipina migrant domestic workers in Taiwan, I demonstrate how women travel through the maid/madam boundary—housewives in home countries become breadwinners by doing domestic work overseas, and foreign maids turn into foreign brides. While migrant women sell their domestic labor in the market, they remain burdened with gendered responsibilities in their own families. Their simultaneous occupancy of paid and unpaid domestic labor is segmented into distinct spatial settings. I underscore women’s agency by presenting how they articulate their paid and unpaid domestic labor and bargain with the monetary and emotional value of their labor.

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This article looks at the changing frameworks for the institutional and cultural incorporation of second-generation rural migrants in Shanghai. Beginning in 2008, Shanghai launched a new policy of accepting migrant children into urban public schools at primary and secondary levels. I show that the hukou (household registration) is still a critical social boundary in educational institutions, shaping uneven distribution of educational resources and opportunities, as well as hierarchical recognition of differences between urbanites and migrants. I have coined the term “segmented incorporation” to characterize a new receiving context, in which systematic exclusion has given way to more subtle forms of institutional segmentation which reproduces cultural prejudice and reinforces group boundaries.

The employment of migrant domestic workers has turned the private home into a contested terrain where employers and workers negotiate social boundaries and distance from one another on a daily basis. Based on indepth interviews with Taiwanese employers and Filipina migrant workers, this article explores how the groups negotiate two sets of social boundaries in the domestic politics of food, space, and privacy: socio-categorical boundaries along the divides of class and ethnicity/nationality, and socio-spatial boundaries segregating the private and public spheres. Along these two dimensions I create two typologies to analyze a variety of boundary work conducted by employers and workers in this global-local, public-private matrix. Domestic service, linked to the dark histories of slavery and colonialism, has long indicated class and racial hierarchies in the private domain. Today, increasing international migratory ows have brought even more women to work in foreign households around the globe. A private household has now become a microcosm of social inequalities in the global economy. Migrant domestic workers are the perfect example of the intimate Other-they are recruited by host countries as desired servants and yet rejected citizens; they are termed "part of the family" by their employers while being excluded from the substance of family lives. Drawing on a qualitative study of Taiwanese domestic employers and Filipina migrant workers, this article explores "boundary work" in the micropolitics of domestic employment. The hiring of foreign domestics demonstrates the process of establishing, reproducing, and contesting social boundaries between "us" and "them." The domestic politics of food and spaceeating meals, distributing food, utilizing home space, and delimiting privacy-involves daily rituals and practices through which both employers and workers negotiate class and ethnic distinctions and organize the public/private spaces in the fabric of family life. Boundary Work in Domestic Employment Evelyn Nakano Glenn (1986) identi es two complementary features of domestic employment: personalism and asymmetry. A sense of personal intimacy can make employment relations seem like family ties, but substantial status difference exists between employers and domestic workers. Such an ironic contrast is particularly evident in the employment of migrant The author is grateful to Carol Heimer, Gary Alan Fine, Orville Lee, Charles Ragin, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Gwo-Shong Hsieh for their comments on previous drafts. The author also thanks James Holstein and the anonymous reviewers of Social Problems for their suggestions and encouragement. Students in the graduate seminar Sociology of Gender (Fall 2001) and the audiences at Tsing-Hua University and Academia Sinica were excellent readers as well. This research was funded by a Dissertation Year Fellowship at Northwestern University, Chiang Ching-Kwo Foundation, and the

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