The Non-Contractual Side of Care, Unpacked. Emotional Work and Shifting Care Boundaries in the Narratives of Immigrant Caretakers in Italy

My paper aims to theoretically revisit the everyday negotiation of professional, emotional and ethnic boundaries between dependent elderly and immigrant care workers. It builds on my own research on home care in Italy – a country marked by increasing concentration of feminized and ethnicized labour in this labour market niche. As part of distinct case studies, I have collected about 300 in-depth interviews to immigrant caretakers, most of them Eastern European and live-in, over the last decade. A striking commonality across their narratives lies in the divergence between their formally defined brief and the emotional work they do display and enact. In order to make sense of this variable gap, I will elaborate on the concepts of boundary-making and emotional work. As a result of differences in ethnicity, social class, age and generation (and often gender), a variety of boundaries are negotiated in everyday interactions between immigrant caretakers and clients. The process whereby their views, needs and habits are mutually constructed, and asymmetrically accommodated, holds significant emotional implications. How the emerging emotional configurations are amenable to mutual manipulation, and what control immigrants exert on them, are issues in need of deeper and more sophisticated understandings.  To be sure, the faceted configurations of emotional labour and boundary-making – as quintessential to this extra-contractual dimension of care – are reluctant to any ready-for-use classification. However, a better understanding of their influence on the quality of care, and on the rights, interest and needs of those involved, is necessary at many levels – including the need to move the debate on immigrant care beyond pietistic, victimizing or merely “technocratic” accounts. The consequences of emotional (over)involvement on immigrants’ conditions and life trajectories are also to be revisited along these lines, as I will do in my paper.