Migration, Transnationalism, and Social Reproduction: Intersectionalities IV

This session brings together theoretical and empirical research papers examining the experiences, agencies, and activism of individuals within immigrant families who are engaged in the work of caring/social reproductive work, both locally and/or transnationally. In particular, the papers will address the following questions: How do social, economic, political, and cultural processes shape these women’s social reproductive work locally and/or transnationally? How do gender and other intersectionalities complicate social reproductive/care work locally and/or transnationally? We welcomed papers that interrogate intergenerational relationships, care and support of older persons, the work of young carers, and the implications of multigenerational households for adult women. Tags: Feminism, Gender, Migration and Immigration

Organizer: Guida Man, York University; Chairs: Sadie Gibson, York University, Guida Man, York University

Presentations

Sadie Gibson, York University

Transnational reconfigurations of social reproduction, care work, and (in)equality

The current state of social reproduction in a global hybrid model of care has disrupted traditional notions of the family and its relationship with the state. With the expansion of social reproduction and caring interventions to suit the needs of a globalized world, the displacement of traditional notions of social reproduction and caregiving has illuminated wider global inequalities. This paper will use a feminist intersectional framework to engage with current arguments and debates in the literature on transnational networks of social reproduction and care. By first locating and defining transnationalism within the literature, this paper will begin by contextualizing what is meant by a transnational model of care through a feminist intersectional framework. Next, focusing on caring abroad and the care drain will address current issues on the extraction of care from the Global South and how the displacement of care creates new forms of the traditional family as the transnational family. Additionally, this paper will engage with transnational commercial surrogacy as a site of transnational social reproduction that displays the various political, economic, gendered and racial inequalities within social reproduction. Finally, this paper will contend that a nuanced understanding of transnational families provides new directions for future literature. This paper will conclude with the argument for an intersectional feminist engagement with the social, economic, political, and cultural processes involved in transnational social reproduction. A feminist intersectional lens provides migration studies with a critical understanding of globalizations various issues and implications for transnational families and networks of care. 

Tania Ruiz-Chapman, University of Toronto

The Dialectics of Disablement at the Border

This paper demonstrates how Canadian immigration policies relating to temporary foreign workers programs, and Canada’s commitment to indefinite detention and/or deportation of undocumented migrants, both perpetually dehumanize some types of people through the denial of citizenship. It analyzes how this process is inherently disabling insofar as it safeguards the ‘pure body’ of the normative legitimized citizen within Canada’s borders, which is a border making project in itself. The paper discusses how denied access to citizenship, and the criminalization of undocumented status, maintains the dominance of settler colonial capitalist rule and order in Canada. Drawing on Marxian dialectical materialism I show how the programs, policies and procedures in question disable already vulnerable populations in the name of economic profit, national security and bio-political legitimacy. I specifically address how some of the movements and contradictions that have occurred produce, reproduce, morph and fortify the border as it exists in the context of this study. In the end the paper takes the mode of production to be the umbrella and hegemonic mechanism of all human socio-political life and identity formation.