Tender Labor: Transnational Young People and Continuums of Familial Care

Abstract

As migrant Filipina mothers embark on domestic labor abroad, their children respond in novel and dynamic ways to the work that needs doing within their households. Such work includes caring for siblings and responding to parents’ emotional and marital struggles. This labor emerges from the feminization of the global labor market, which leaves a care slot that young people register and work to fill. Attention to young people’s perspectives on their families and to their enactments of what I call “tender labor” recasts ongoing discussions about care work by highlighting how young people actively participate in the processes of transnational family separation and reunification. A pair of case studies reveals the impact of care extraction in the recesses of domestic life, as children struggle to mitigate the precarity of life for themselves and their loved ones.