Men and Domestic Labor: A Missing Link in the Global Care Chain

Abstract

This article develops Manalansan’s critique that the concept of global care chains, while feminizing scholarship on the relationship between migration and globalization, has been less successful at gendering it, in part because it largely ignores men. The article responds to this gap by focusing on male domestic workers. The focus is such, however, that a new dimension to the emerging research agenda on male domestic workers is suggested. Thus, it is argued that in addition to examining how men are implicated in the global redistribution of stereotypically female tasks of domestic labor, we need to broaden our conceptualization of social reproduction to interrogate the ways in which stereotypically male areas of domestic work, such as gardening and household repair and maintenance, are embedded in global care chains. The argument is based on a review of the existing literature, as well as findings emerging from the author and colleague’s on-going exploration in the United Kingdom, using quantitative and qualitative research methods, of the scale, characteristics, dynamics, and drivers of the commoditization of specifically male tasks of social reproduction and their displacement onto migrant men.