Contrasting Contexts: Investigating the Variations of Migrant Care Work

Migrant care work has received vast attention over the last decades. Numerous studies focusing on migrant care workers’ experiences of inequalities, discrimination, and potential exploitation have pointed to the intersections of various structural categories, such as gender, class, race, and ethnicity or religion. However, since migrant care workers’ personal histories of transnational movement and their professional paths vary substantially and are related to specific and diverse combinations of structural conditions, an intersectional approach needs to first identify the relevant categories on each level of investigation. This contribution reflects on the usefulness and applicability, as well as on the limitations of an intersectional approach to investigate migrant care work by proposing a comparative approach. Drawing on narrative-biographical interviews, three different cases illustrate the variations of possible intersections stemming from diverse contextual conditions.