Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gul Deniz Hos

Date

2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

English

Committee Chair

Shelby Crosby

Committee Member

Jarey Mickalites

Committee Member

Jeffrey Scraba

Committee Member

Terrence Tucker

Abstract

Neoliberal globalization has stimulated a continuous rise in migrant women’s domestic work in industrialized Western countries. In the global North, a growing number of female immigrants have supplemented precarious, low-waged, unprotected, unstable, or even unwaged care labor undertaken by mostly female residents as cleaners, caregivers, nurses, babysitters, or domestic service workers. Thus, ironically, non-migrant women’s participation in the public workforce is enabled by migrant women’s mostly devalued, underpaid domestic work in private households. It also upholds the perception that childcare is a private rather than public responsibility. The exploitation of women’s reproductive labor and the feminization of childcare has a long global history; outsourcing this labor to disfranchised, underprivileged migrant women reproduces gross inequalities across citizenship, gender, class, and race in today’s globalized world. Their care labor is seen as expendable, natural, or raw material that does not require any investment. This demonstrates that there is a vicious cycle of history rather than linear development, wherein exploitation is rebranded by capitalism and neoliberalism to support wealthy, largely white households and economies. Contemporary African and Caribbean women writers’ fiction explores immigration as a deeply visceral, psychological, racial, socioeconomic, and gender-based experience shaped by the colonial past and today’s global capitalism. The protagonists try to discover, rediscover, and negotiate their immigrant identities, overshadowed by systemic inequalities and pervasive discrimination. Given their unique identities, histories, diverse immigration statuses, motivations for immigrating, and diasporic experiences, it is important to avoid homogenizing narratives of female immigrants. This project examines how childcare work in the North is shaped by intersectional inequalities along citizenship, class, race, and gender lines in Lucy (1990) by Jamaica Kincaid, Grace in the City (2011) by Victoria Brown, Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Patsy (2019) by Nicole Dennis-Benn through representations of racialization and feminization of reproductive work and devaluation of affective labor. Drawing on decolonial Black feminist approaches, supplemented by key insights from affect theory in immigration studies, it further investigates how legacies of colonial order, reinforced through gender and racial segregation in the labor market and dehumanizing immigration regulations, are manifested in everyday encounters of the female protagonists.

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Data is provided by the student.

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Notes

Open access.

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