Reproducing the national family

Kinship claims, development discourse and migrant caregivers in Palestine/Israel

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4367155
AutoresRachel H Brown (0000-0003-4926-5272, Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen20
Número3
Páginas247-268
Fecha de publicación2019-08-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1464700119833039
OpenAlexW2921552797
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas42

This article probes the politics of the migrant caregiver/citizen-employer relationship in Palestine/Israel as it unfolds within the Jewish-Israeli home. Based on interviews with migrants from the Philippines, Nepal, India and Sri Lanka and their Jewish-Israeli employers, I examine how Israel's ethno-racially hierarchical citizenship regime and the transnational gendering and racialisation of carework manifest in this relationship. I begin by situating migrant women working as caregivers within the legal and political context of Palestine/Israel, delineating how gendered constructions of the Jewish-Israeli woman uphold the borders of the nation and paint non-Jewish migrant women as reproductively threatening. I then analyse two common tropes among citizen-employers in describing migrant caregivers. The first, what I term the 'kinship trope', characterizes them as 'one of the family', obscuring the ethno-racial basis of the state. I show how this trope contrasts sharply with Zionist settler colonial rhetoric portraying Jewish-Israelis as 'one big family'. The second trope represents migrant women as individual agents of economic development and Israel as a market-driven, neoliberal society that is equally a state for all its citizens. By depicting Israel as a 'modern', 'progressive' state that is an exemplar of gender equality, this trope again masks the ethno-racial basis of citizenship, as well as gender disparities. Finally, I argue for a feminist approach to migrant carework that accounts for the ways neoliberal labour formations are mediated by gendered racisms specific to a particular state's racial nation-building project

Citizenship · Context (archaeology) · Family reunification · Heteronormativity · Immigration · Judaism · Kinship · Political science · Politics · Queer · Refugee · Rhetoric · Sociology · State (computer science) · Trope (literature) · Anthropology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society