TY - JOUR

T1 - Female immigration and the ambivalence of dirty care work

T2 - Caribbean nurses in imperial Britain

AU - Olwig, Karen Fog

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - It is a generally accepted view that immigrants, especially women, often are relegated to performing the denigrated dirty care work that the local population refuses to do. Studies of Caribbean women who trained and worked as nurses in the post-Second World War British hospitals thus have emphasized that they were especially saddled with tasks involving unclean substances reflective of their racialized, low-status position as immigrants in Britain. Drawing on Bakhtin’s analysis of dirt, this article argues that the categorization of immigrants’ work as particularly dirty refers not only to their position as marginalized, discriminated outsiders. It also represents both a tacit recognition of their essential contribution to the regeneration of the receiving society and an attempt to control the transgressive potential inherent in this contribution by debasing their work. Immigrants therefore are branded as doing dirty work, because they represent a transformative force that is both needed and feared.

AB - It is a generally accepted view that immigrants, especially women, often are relegated to performing the denigrated dirty care work that the local population refuses to do. Studies of Caribbean women who trained and worked as nurses in the post-Second World War British hospitals thus have emphasized that they were especially saddled with tasks involving unclean substances reflective of their racialized, low-status position as immigrants in Britain. Drawing on Bakhtin’s analysis of dirt, this article argues that the categorization of immigrants’ work as particularly dirty refers not only to their position as marginalized, discriminated outsiders. It also represents both a tacit recognition of their essential contribution to the regeneration of the receiving society and an attempt to control the transgressive potential inherent in this contribution by debasing their work. Immigrants therefore are branded as doing dirty work, because they represent a transformative force that is both needed and feared.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - migration

KW - nursing

KW - dirt

KW - excretions

KW - hierarchy

KW - Caribbean

KW - neo-colonialism

KW - Britain

KW - race

KW - gender

U2 - 10.1177/1466138117697744

DO - 10.1177/1466138117697744

M3 - Journal article

VL - 19

SP - 44

EP - 62

JO - Ethnography

JF - Ethnography

SN - 1466-1381

IS - 1

ER -