From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor

Domestic Distinctions: Constructing difference among paid domestic workers in Toronto

“…For some domestic workers, working in what they see as a low-status occupation means that stigma, low self-esteem and low self-worth are also relatively common. In part, these experiences relate to the asymmetrical power relations between the domestic worker and her employer (Cock, 1980;Gaitskell et al , 1984;Rollins, 1985;Glenn, 1986Glenn, , 1992Bradshaw-Camball & Cohen, 1988;Colen, 1989;Romero, 1992;Thornton-Dill, 1994;Mattingley, 1996). The characteristics and experiences of domestic work are further exacerbated when the domestic worker is`living in'.…”

Defending Intimacy against What? Limits of Antisurrogacy Feminisms

“…They also incite a latent struggle, to be fought by surrogacy workers themselves, against the structurally gendered and racialized degradations that waged reproducers of life and of class society face (Boris and Parreñas 2010). Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas's seminal collection Intimate Labors (2010) was among those to begin treating professional surrogates as part of a historic group-from migrant maids, nannies, and hostesses to sex workers-whose service is figured as dirtied by commerce, in contrast to the supposedly free or natural love acts of an angelic white bourgeois femininity it in fact makes possible (see also Glenn 1992;Roberts 1997). …”

“…To recap, the most up-to-date scholarship on surrogacy locates it not only within new macroeconomic trends (outsourcing, bioinformatics) but also old ones: the feudal, colonial, racial, and classed women's labors that have always supported the realization of the Western nuclear family and that still stand in the wings of "natural," bourgeois childbirth (Glenn 1992;Roberts 1997;Vora 2015). We must resist the temptation to treat surrogacy as new and as different from the "innocent" family-whether we think surrogacy is better than that family or worse-for our political ends.…”

Contextualizing dirty work: The neglected role of cultural, historical, and demographic context

“…And this danger is only abetted by normalizing ideologies that provide explanations for the clustering. Glenn (1992), for example, describes how African American, Mexican American, and Japanese American women were, through discrimination, historically channeled into domestic service: 'Once they were in service, their association with "degraded" labor affirmed their supposed natural inferiority…Thus ideologies of race and gender were created and verified in daily life ' (p. 32). Such ideologies are clearly circular: certain categories of socioeconomic status, gender, and racioethnicity are believed to be well-suited to low-prestige dirty work, and their disproportionate clustering in these occupations is then taken as confirmation of their suitability.…”