Hierarchies of desirability in home care: gender, ethnicity, and the labour of intimacy

Abstract

In Western Europe, the home-based care sector has become increasingly dependent on the labour of migrant women, reflecting broader dynamics of the globalisation of care. This transnational redistribution of reproductive labour produces a new international division of care, marked by intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, and national origin. Within this context, migrant care workers are differentially valued and categorised – often along implicit lines of desirability.

This article examines how such hierarchies are constructed and negotiated across three spaces of interaction: (i) families and older care recipients, who produce racialised and gendered typologies of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ workers through their everyday affective and moral judgements; (ii) care agencies and intermediaries, which mediate and sometimes reinforce these preferences; and (iii) migrant care workers themselves, who navigate, internalise, or resist these classifications in their daily practices.

Particular attention is paid to how proximity, emotional labour, and bodily presence become sites of symbolic and moral evaluation, producing a hierarchy of desirability grounded in both colonial legacies and the affective regimes of intimate labour. By analysing these dynamics in the context of elder care in Belgium, the article contributes to debates on affective governance, intimate bordering, and the emotional politics of migration and labour.