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Accepted Paper:
Undoing the border through care: ethnography of female labour migration based on the Malagasy au pairs in Belgium, Germany and France
Elise Huysmans
(UCLouvain)
Many Malagasy undertake au pair stays to turn them into migration projects to Northern countries. This paper will analyze the path taken by these female migrants and how they mobilize care practices to "undo borders" and, in their words, secure "a better future" for themselves.
Paper Abstract:
Structurally, Northern societies delegate a large part of care work to migrants from the South. These delegations of care have been analyzed as "global care chains" (Hochschild 2014) made up of multiple links where personal ties between individuals from all over the world are based on paid or unpaid care work. In this context, a large number of young Malagasy undertake au pair stays to turn them into genuine migration projects to Northern countries. Indeed, as an inexpensive option that gives easy access to a visa in the countries targeted by the migration projects, the au pair stay is for many young Malagasy women the starting point for their mobility towards the countries of the North. Based on an ethnography carried out in Madagascar, France, Belgium and Germany, this paper will analyze the path taken by these female migrants and how they mobilize care practices and play on gender stereotypes to "undo borders" and, in their words, secure "a better future" for themselves. We will also see that, more broadly speaking, Malagasy women of all ages mobilize formal and informal care work in order to have the possibility to migrate, notably through marriage (Cole 2014). The mobilization of care to secure a migratory path is therefore also a family process.