Suchergebnisse

"In Unsettled Labors, Rachel H. Brown explores the overlooked labor of migrant workers in Israel's eldercare industry. Brown argues that live-in eldercare in Palestine/Israel, which is primarily done by migrant workers, is an often invisible area where settler colonialism is reproduced culturally, economically, and biologically. Situating Israeli labor markets within a longer history of imperialism and dispossession of Palestinian land, Brown positions migrant eldercare within the resulting tangle of Israeli laws, policies, and social discourses. She draws from interviews with caretakers, public statements, court documents, and first-hand fieldwork to uncover the inherently contradictory nature of elder care work: the intimate presence of South and Southeast Asian workers in the home unsettles the idea of the Israeli home as an exclusively Jewish space. By paying close attention to the comparative racialization of migrant workers, Palestinians, asylum seekers, and Mizrahi and Ashkenazi settlers, Brown raises important questions of labor, social reproduction, displacement, and citizenship told through the stories of collective care provided by migrant workers in a settler colonial state."

This essay considers how an "intimacy contract," as a conceptual tool and a political reality, extends existing critiques of the social contract tradition by accounting for the privatized nature of the post-9/11 US empire. Examining critiques by Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, I argue that an intimacy contract uncovers the coercive power relations underlying neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurial freedom. Focusing on migrant labor on US military bases, I provide an overview of the racial, sexual, and settler contracts and the need to extend Mills's and Pateman's critiques of embodiment and spatiality. Next, I suggest how the intimacy contract generates a transnational, embodied account of the labors upholding US empire; a lens into the shifting significance of these labors under neoliberal imperialism; and a chronicling of desire and workers' interests. In conclusion, I suggest how the intimacy contract exposes multiple resistances to US empire and neoliberal capitalism.

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.