Tender Labour
Tender Labour
Migrant Care Work, Filipina/o Young People, and Family Life across Borders
As demand for domestic workers outpaces supply in the Global North, more and more racialized women are migrating to fill the gap. What happens to the children they must leave behind? Tender Labour investigates the experiences of young people as they navigate the perils of precarity, family separation, and uncertain futures when their mothers travel from the Philippines for work.
Jennifer Shaw conducts nuanced ethnographic research with migrant youth who have been separated from and later reunited with their mothers in Canada, incorporating their own voices into the narrative through poems, song lyrics, and photographs. She focuses on how their tender labour – the less acknowledged work they perform within their transnational families – emerges not only from necessity in an unequal world but also in response to the stresses and dreams that tug at the threads of kinship.
The central role of young people in such familial migrations casts light on some of the less visible consequences of the capitalist extraction of parents’ labour over great distances. Nonetheless, despite childhoods and work shaped by economic inequality and racialized disparity in Canada, Shaw discovers that these Filipina/o young people keep their hope of a good life.
This accessible and compelling piece of work will find an audience among scholars of migration and child and youth studies, anthropology and sociology students, policy-makers, and non-governmental organizations working with migrant young people.
Tender Labour addresses how analyses of migrations must account for other affected individuals, for transition spaces between separation and reunification, and for potential futures shaped by the past and present. Shaw’s thorough and thoughtful engagement with various academic disciplines and fields is impressive.
Shaw’s notion of ‘tender labour’ is a beautiful and generative articulation of the complexities of reproductive work, which is at once loving, limiting, useful, and unrecognized. Tender Labour provides rich insights into what it means to live in a transnational family in a highly unequal world.
Jennifer E. Shaw is an assistant professor of sociology and politics at Thompson Rivers University. She holds a PhD in anthropology. Her writing has been featured in Children & Society, Global Studies of Childhood, and the Anthropology of Work Review. Before entering academia, she was an award-winning youth settlement worker in the non-profit sector in Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia.
