Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
Biographic Data
| ID | 92475 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rhacel Salazar Parreñas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rhacel Salazar |
| FAMILY NAME | Parreñas |
| SIGNATURE | PARREÑAS R S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5233-3526 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1087 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Care economies: States, markets and inequalities
This special issue engages with the concept of ‘care economies’, broadly defined by sociologist Ito Peng (2019) as the economic sector concerned with caring for and nurturing present and future populations. This special issue challenges the tendency in the literature to reduce care to informal household labour by drawing attention to the ways in which care is increasingly commodified, formalized and regulated. By examining care economies both ins…
Introduction: Philippine Labor Migration 50 Years Later
This article introduces the Special Country Report on the Philippines. It provides a brief history of the governance of labor migration from the Philippines, which officially began with the 1974 Labor Code. The article examines Philippine migration governance and addresses the relationship of the state to other key actors of migration with a particular focus on the government's reliance on labor recruitment agencies. Finally, this article describ…
Migration and citizenship pathways in/beyond Asia
Transnational Feminism and the Sociology of Gender
The governance of the Kafala system and the punitive control of migrant domestic workers
In the United Arab Emirates, the kafala system binds migrant domestic workers to employment with one employer‐sponsor. While various studies have identified the labour conditions elicited by the kafala system, research has paid less attention to the forces that underpin workers' interest in accommodating the constraints of the kafala . This article examines the effects of two punitive legal mechanisms that discipline domestic workers to remain wi…
Mechanisms of migrant exclusion: Temporary labour, precarious noncitizenship, and technologies of detention
‘Mechanisms of Migrant Exclusion’ focuses on the exclusionary measures that migrant workers confront. Although migration studies have long attended to various social and structural systems of exclusion, for instance, xenophobia and nativism (De Genova, 2005, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822387091 ; Golash‐Boza, 2011, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203123928 , and 2015, https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479894666.001.0001 ), recent global shifts in imm…
Essential and Expendable: Migrant Domestic Workers and the Covid-19 Pandemic
In this article, we examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor conditions of domestic workers in the epicenter of the United States. We focus our analysis on the symbolic categorization of domestic work as "essential labor." While domestic workers are lauded as heroes in public discourse, we argue that this symbolic recognition does not extend to material remuneration. Instead, we find that labor conditions better fit their categor…
Discipline and Empower: The State Governance of Migrant Domestic Workers
How do states manage their populations? Some scholars see the state as primarily governing through punishment, but how might the state engage in other forms of disciplining subjects? I address these questions by exploring the state management of labor migration through interviews and participant observation of compulsory government workshops. I look at the case of Filipino domestic workers in Arab states. States are said to exercise bio-power whe…
Soft violence: Migrant domestic worker precarity and the management of unfree labour in Singapore
In Singapore, the temporary legal status of migrant domestic workers binds them in servitude to their employer-sponsor as their residency is contingent on their continuous and sole live-in employment with a sponsor whose permission they must secure in order to transfer jobs. This legal status technically renders domestic workers unfree and precarious as it gives employers tremendous power over domestic workers. Based on 30 in-depth interviews wit…
The mobility pathways of migrant domestic workers
This article identifies and examines the mobility pathways of migrant domestic workers, meaning the course of action they undertake to secure continuous employment. Mobility pathways refer not only to migratory practices and processes but also concern shifts in one’s employment, legal and social status. This article examines the mobility pathways of migrant domestic workers in order to interrogate the possibilities of socio-economic mobility allo…
The Gendered Racialization of Asian Women as Villainous Temptresses
What explains white male animus against Asian women? We address this question by examining the murders in Atlanta, GA, which reflect a larger global pattern of violence against what are perceived as hypersexualized Asian women. Dominant discourses on these murders promote either a narrative of racial xenophobia or a stance for or against sex work. Neither discourse adequately accounts for the simultaneous racial and gendered determination of Asia…
The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization
Taking as her subjects migrant Filipina domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles, transnational migrant families in the Philippines, and Filipina migrant entertainers in Tokyo, Parreñas documents the social, cultural, and political pressures that maintain women’s domesticity in migration, as well as the ways migrant women and their children negotiate these adversities. Parreñas examines the underlying constructions of gender in neoliberal state r…
Thinking Policy Through Migrant Domestic Workers' Itineraries
This article summarizes key findings from our research on Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates to reflect on their implications for policy. To illustrate the patterns we have observed, the article traces the migration biographies of two women, one from West Java and one from the Philippines, and it then asks what their experiences reveal about the policy landscape. We find, in concert with a large body of l…
Precarity chains: Cycles of domestic worker migration from Southeast Asia to the Middle East
This article examines how the emergent serial labour migration patterns (Parreñas, Rhacel, Carolyn Choi, Maria Hwang, and Rachel Silvey. 2018 (on-line). “Serial Labor Migration: Precarity and Itinerancy among Filipino and Indonesian Domestic Workers.” On-line First: October, 2018. Accessed January 15, 2019. doi:10.1177/0197918318804769 [IMR]) of migrant domestic workers are shaped by their precarious positions in the global labour market. Based o…
Serial Labor Migration: Precarity and Itinerancy among Filipino and Indonesian Domestic Workers
This article examines the mobility patterns of migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates. It identifies and explains the emergence of serial labor migration , which we define as the multi-country, itinerant labor migration patterns of temporary low-skilled migrant workers. It argues that policy contexts shaping temporary labor migration, as they impose precarious and prohibitive conditions of settlement in both countries of origin and …
The Precarity of Migrant Domestic Work
Domestic workers comprise the largest group of female migrant workers today, and they are among the most precarious workers internationally. This article explores the aspects of the organization of domestic work that contribute to keeping it an insecure, underpaid, and underprotected sector. Because domestic work is not generally understood to be “real work,” it tends not to have the same legal labor protections that other sectors enjoy. The essa…
Caring for Strangers. Filipino medical Workers in Asia, written by Megha Amrith
Introduction: Special issue on technologies of intimate labour
This article introduces the concept of ‘technologies of intimate labour’, which refers to practices of intimate labour that forge identities, enable self-actualization, and allow self-growth. It describes the two underlying themes that bring together this special issue: aspirational politics of sex or sexual identity and the moral regimes of sexual labour
The Indenture of Migrant Domestic Workers
This article provides an overview of the legal status of migrant domestic workers in key destinations that grant employment visas to such workers. While the passage of the International Labour Organization Domestic Workers Convention in 2011 suggests the increasing recognition of paid domestic work as "real work," this article examines the terms of employment and residency for migrant domestic workers and establishes the minimal recognition of th…
Intimate Labour and Social Justice: Engaging with the Work of Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (Dispatch)
Servants of globalization: Migration and domestic work
Servants of Globalization offers a groundbreaking study of migrant Filipino domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the caretaking work of the global economy. Since its initial publication, the book has informed countless students and scholars and set the research agenda on labor migration and transnational families.With this second edition, Rhacel Salazar Parrenas returns to Rome and Los Angeles to consider how the migrant com…
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965: Legislating a New America
Along with the civil rights and voting rights acts, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 is one of the most important bills of the civil rights era. The Act's political, legal, and demographic impact continues to be felt, yet its legacy is controversial. The 1965 Act was groundbreaking in eliminating the white America immigration policy in place since 1790, ending Asian exclusion, and limiting discrimination against Eastern European Cathol…
Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change
What Is Human Trafficking? A Review Essay
The reproductive labour of migrant workers
In this article, I revisit my formulation of the 'international division of reproductive labour', also known as the 'care chain', and address its impacts on the study of migrant care workers. I also address future directions in the study of migrant care workers, calling attention to the contributions made in this special issue, specifically the need to focus on elderly care, different organizational arrangements of care, and the geopolitics of ca…
Long distance intimacy: Class, gender and intergenerational relations between mothers and children in Filipino transnational families
In this article I address transnational intergenerational relations between Filipino migrant mothers and their young adult children and examine how families achieve intimacy across great distances. I do this by identifying and examining the transnational communication methods Filipino migrant families use to develop intimacy, in other words familiarity, across borders. In my analysis, I address how political economy and gender shape the dynamics …
Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care
Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor
This article examines the politics of reproductive labor in globalization. Using the case of migrant Filipina domestic workers, the author presents the formation of a three-tier transfer of reproductive labor in globalization between the following groups of women: (1) middle-class women in receiving nations, (2) migrant domestic workers, and (3) Third World women who are too poor to migrate. The formation of this international division of labor s…
Mothering from a Distance: Emotions, Gender, and Intergenerational Relations in Filipino Transnational Families
Transnational Fathering: Gendered Conflicts, Distant Disciplining and Emotional Gaps
Women's migration spurs the reconfiguration of the gender division of labour in transnational families, while the migration of men maintains it. Father-away migrant families usually mirror modern nuclear households. The only difference is the temporal and spatial rearrangement brought by the father's work: instead of the father routinely getting back home to his family during suppertime, he comes back home from work every ten months. My paper loo…
Precarity chains: Cycles of domestic worker migration from Southeast Asia to the Middle East
This article examines how the emergent serial labour migration patterns (Parreñas, Rhacel, Carolyn Choi, Maria Hwang, and Rachel Silvey. 2018 (on-line). “Serial Labor Migration: Precarity and Itinerancy among Filipino and Indonesian Domestic Workers.” On-line First: October, 2018. Accessed January 15, 2019. doi:10.1177/0197918318804769 [IMR]) of migrant domestic workers are shaped by their precarious positions in the global labour market. Based o…
Serial Labor Migration: Precarity and Itinerancy among Filipino and Indonesian Domestic Workers
This article examines the mobility patterns of migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates. It identifies and explains the emergence of serial labor migration , which we define as the multi-country, itinerant labor migration patterns of temporary low-skilled migrant workers. It argues that policy contexts shaping temporary labor migration, as they impose precarious and prohibitive conditions of settlement in both countries of origin and …
Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change
Homeward bound: The circular migration of entertainers between Japan and the Philippines
One feature of globalization is the growing number of temporary labour migrants, but their experience of settlement does not always fit the dominant perspective of transnational migration. Unlike transnational migrants, circular migrants tend not to be equally entrenched in home and host societies, but instead hold feelings of greater affinity for the home society. They engage in repeated short periods of work abroad, an example being migrant Fil…
Children in the Global Sex Trade
Discipline and Empower: The State Governance of Migrant Domestic Workers
How do states manage their populations? Some scholars see the state as primarily governing through punishment, but how might the state engage in other forms of disciplining subjects? I address these questions by exploring the state management of labor migration through interviews and participant observation of compulsory government workshops. I look at the case of Filipino domestic workers in Arab states. States are said to exercise bio-power whe…
Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes
"With an ethnographer's ear and a social critic's lens, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas illuminates the care deficit of the immigrant second generation, the children of transnational Filipino families left behind by mothers and fathers who labor in the global economy."—Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara
Servants of globalization: Migration and domestic work
Servants of Globalization offers a groundbreaking study of migrant Filipino domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the caretaking work of the global economy. Since its initial publication, the book has informed countless students and scholars and set the research agenda on labor migration and transnational families.With this second edition, Rhacel Salazar Parrenas returns to Rome and Los Angeles to consider how the migrant com…
The reproductive labour of migrant workers
In this article, I revisit my formulation of the 'international division of reproductive labour', also known as the 'care chain', and address its impacts on the study of migrant care workers. I also address future directions in the study of migrant care workers, calling attention to the contributions made in this special issue, specifically the need to focus on elderly care, different organizational arrangements of care, and the geopolitics of ca…
Soft violence: Migrant domestic worker precarity and the management of unfree labour in Singapore
In Singapore, the temporary legal status of migrant domestic workers binds them in servitude to their employer-sponsor as their residency is contingent on their continuous and sole live-in employment with a sponsor whose permission they must secure in order to transfer jobs. This legal status technically renders domestic workers unfree and precarious as it gives employers tremendous power over domestic workers. Based on 30 in-depth interviews wit…
The mobility pathways of migrant domestic workers
This article identifies and examines the mobility pathways of migrant domestic workers, meaning the course of action they undertake to secure continuous employment. Mobility pathways refer not only to migratory practices and processes but also concern shifts in one’s employment, legal and social status. This article examines the mobility pathways of migrant domestic workers in order to interrogate the possibilities of socio-economic mobility allo…
Essential and Expendable: Migrant Domestic Workers and the Covid-19 Pandemic
In this article, we examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the labor conditions of domestic workers in the epicenter of the United States. We focus our analysis on the symbolic categorization of domestic work as "essential labor." While domestic workers are lauded as heroes in public discourse, we argue that this symbolic recognition does not extend to material remuneration. Instead, we find that labor conditions better fit their categor…
The Gendered Racialization of Asian Women as Villainous Temptresses
What explains white male animus against Asian women? We address this question by examining the murders in Atlanta, GA, which reflect a larger global pattern of violence against what are perceived as hypersexualized Asian women. Dominant discourses on these murders promote either a narrative of racial xenophobia or a stance for or against sex work. Neither discourse adequately accounts for the simultaneous racial and gendered determination of Asia…
The Gender Paradox in the Transnational Families of Filipino Migrant Women
This article examines the division of labor in the transnational families of migrant mothers from the Philippines using interviews with young adult children and guardians in 30 mother-away transnational families. It looks closely at the work of fathers, migrant mothers, eldest daughters, and extended kin to show that caring practices in the transnational families of migrant women perpetuate conventional gender norms of the family. As it specifica…
The governance of the Kafala system and the punitive control of migrant domestic workers
In the United Arab Emirates, the kafala system binds migrant domestic workers to employment with one employer‐sponsor. While various studies have identified the labour conditions elicited by the kafala system, research has paid less attention to the forces that underpin workers' interest in accommodating the constraints of the kafala . This article examines the effects of two punitive legal mechanisms that discipline domestic workers to remain wi…
White Trash” Meets the “Little Brown Monkeys”: The Taxi Dance Hall as a Site of Interracial and Gender Alliances between White Working Class Women and Filipino Immigrant Men in the 1920s and 30s
Migration and citizenship pathways in/beyond Asia
Mechanisms of migrant exclusion: Temporary labour, precarious noncitizenship, and technologies of detention
‘Mechanisms of Migrant Exclusion’ focuses on the exclusionary measures that migrant workers confront. Although migration studies have long attended to various social and structural systems of exclusion, for instance, xenophobia and nativism (De Genova, 2005, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822387091 ; Golash‐Boza, 2011, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203123928 , and 2015, https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479894666.001.0001 ), recent global shifts in imm…
The Indenture of Migrant Domestic Workers
This article provides an overview of the legal status of migrant domestic workers in key destinations that grant employment visas to such workers. While the passage of the International Labour Organization Domestic Workers Convention in 2011 suggests the increasing recognition of paid domestic work as "real work," this article examines the terms of employment and residency for migrant domestic workers and establishes the minimal recognition of th…
Thinking Policy Through Migrant Domestic Workers' Itineraries
This article summarizes key findings from our research on Indonesian and Filipino migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates to reflect on their implications for policy. To illustrate the patterns we have observed, the article traces the migration biographies of two women, one from West Java and one from the Philippines, and it then asks what their experiences reveal about the policy landscape. We find, in concert with a large body of l…
White Trash” Meets the “Little Brown Monkeys”: The Taxi Dance Hall as a Site of Interracial and Gender Alliances between White Working Class Women and Filipino Immigrant Men in the 1920s and 30s
Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor
This article examines the politics of reproductive labor in globalization. Using the case of migrant Filipina domestic workers, the author presents the formation of a three-tier transfer of reproductive labor in globalization between the following groups of women: (1) middle-class women in receiving nations, (2) migrant domestic workers, and (3) Third World women who are too poor to migrate. The formation of this international division of labor s…
Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work
Mothering from a Distance: Emotions, Gender, and Intergenerational Relations in Filipino Transnational Families
The Kitchen Spoon's Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka's Migrant Housemaids
At the Cost of Women
In this article, I examine the discursive construction of the family in the Philippine economic and legal system. I show that the state economy promotes the formation of split-apart families but that the state also uses the patriarchal nuclear family as a symbol of national identity in the modernization-building project of the Philippines. This disjuncture comes at the expense of the nation. Questioning the motives behind state efforts to achieve…
Enfants et familles transnationales dans la nouvelle économie mondiale: Conflits aux Philippines
Les nations les plus développées du monde sont confrontées à une crise de plus en plus grave du secteur des soins aux personnes dépendantes. Alors que la demande de prise en charge a augmenté, l’offre de ces services a diminué. Il en résulte un déficit de la prise en charge des personnes dépendantes, déficit auquel les femmes venues des Philippines ont répondu en masse. Parmi les immigrés philippins, environ les deux tiers sont des femmes, et leu…
Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes
"With an ethnographer's ear and a social critic's lens, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas illuminates the care deficit of the immigrant second generation, the children of transnational Filipino families left behind by mothers and fathers who labor in the global economy."—Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara
The Gender Paradox in the Transnational Families of Filipino Migrant Women
This article examines the division of labor in the transnational families of migrant mothers from the Philippines using interviews with young adult children and guardians in 30 mother-away transnational families. It looks closely at the work of fathers, migrant mothers, eldest daughters, and extended kin to show that caring practices in the transnational families of migrant women perpetuate conventional gender norms of the family. As it specifica…
Long distance intimacy: Class, gender and intergenerational relations between mothers and children in Filipino transnational families
In this article I address transnational intergenerational relations between Filipino migrant mothers and their young adult children and examine how families achieve intimacy across great distances. I do this by identifying and examining the transnational communication methods Filipino migrant families use to develop intimacy, in other words familiarity, across borders. In my analysis, I address how political economy and gender shape the dynamics …
Children in the Global Sex Trade
Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions
Asian migrants are inextricably linked to contemporary debates concerning the nation-state, neoliberalism, globalization, and transnationalism. This volume brings together these streams of inquiry and proposes a synthetic approach to examine various processes of migration and community formation on a global scale. The essays included in Asian Diasporas look at the worldwide dispersal of Asian populations through the lens of diaspora. They illustr…
The Gender Ideological Clash in Globalization: Women, Migration, and the Modernization Building Project of the Philippines
processes on the socio-cultural geography of the Philippines. I argue that the development of an export-oriented Filipino economy incorporates a gender ideological clash resulting from simultaneously encouraging and discouraging female domesticity. This clash emerges from the economic dependency of the Philippines on women's work outside the home on the one hand, and a longstanding gender ideology that continues to locate women's gender responsib…
The Globalization of Care Work
Transnational Fathering: Gendered Conflicts, Distant Disciplining and Emotional Gaps
Women's migration spurs the reconfiguration of the gender division of labour in transnational families, while the migration of men maintains it. Father-away migrant families usually mirror modern nuclear households. The only difference is the temporal and spatial rearrangement brought by the father's work: instead of the father routinely getting back home to his family during suppertime, he comes back home from work every ten months. My paper loo…
Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care
Sexual Labors: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Toward Sex as Work
What constitutes ‘sex’ and defines ‘labor’ has varied across time and space, we have learned over the last 35 years through an explosion of monographs and articles in the history and sociology of sexuality and labor studies. But rarely has the new labor studies, with its attention to gender, race, and ethnicity and its consideration of unpaid as well as paid work, put sexual labors at the center of its focus. Even the rich literature on prostitut…
Not Every Family: Selective Reunification in Contemporary US Immigration Laws
This article questions the notion that family reunification is the cornerstone of US immigration policies and points to the violation of the right to family reunification in US law. It specifically looks at the forcible separation of legal residents from their families, including foreign domestic workers in the Labor Certification Program; US-born children with undocumented relatives, including parents and siblings; and guest workers. We argue th…
Homeward bound: The circular migration of entertainers between Japan and the Philippines
One feature of globalization is the growing number of temporary labour migrants, but their experience of settlement does not always fit the dominant perspective of transnational migration. Unlike transnational migrants, circular migrants tend not to be equally entrenched in home and host societies, but instead hold feelings of greater affinity for the home society. They engage in repeated short periods of work abroad, an example being migrant Fil…
Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo
Working alongside migrant Filipina hostesses in Japan, Parreñas investigates the impact of being labeled as trafficked victims and explores what governments should do to improve the lives of global migrants
Multicultural East Asia: An Introduction
This introduction to the special issue of JEMS on multicultural East Asia underscores the nexus between national identity and multiculturalism in Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Demographic and structural changes are assumed to serve as levers of change toward multiculturalism. However, the articles in this issue demonstrate the cultural and social challenges engendered by multiculturalism, and the salience of race, gender, ethnicity and class in the st…
What Is Human Trafficking? A Review Essay
The reproductive labour of migrant workers
In this article, I revisit my formulation of the 'international division of reproductive labour', also known as the 'care chain', and address its impacts on the study of migrant care workers. I also address future directions in the study of migrant care workers, calling attention to the contributions made in this special issue, specifically the need to focus on elderly care, different organizational arrangements of care, and the geopolitics of ca…
Confronting Equality: Gender, Knowledge and Global Change
Servants of globalization: Migration and domestic work
Servants of Globalization offers a groundbreaking study of migrant Filipino domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the caretaking work of the global economy. Since its initial publication, the book has informed countless students and scholars and set the research agenda on labor migration and transnational families.With this second edition, Rhacel Salazar Parrenas returns to Rome and Los Angeles to consider how the migrant com…
Political science (35 works) · Sociology (34 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (29 works) · Law (28 works) · Economics (20 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy (16 works) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (14 works) · Economic growth (14 works) · Migrant workers (13 works)