Gender on the Verge: Precarity, Hidden Labor, and Migration In Turbulent Times

In a globalized world marked by uncertainty and turbulence, labor migration distributes its costs unevenly along gendered lines, and this session asks what those costs reveal about gender itself. We use "the verge" to name a condition of uncertainty shaped by economic instability, political change, and the growing influence of artificial intelligence in the governance of labor and mobility. Migrant women, concentrated in care, domestic, and service work, carry a double burden: the precarity of low-wage labor and the emotional labor of sustaining transnational households. LGBTQ+ labor migrants face additional precarity and exclusion, as legal, bureaucratic, and social institutions often fail to recognize diverse sexual and gender identities, with trans migrants further confronting systems built on binary understandings of gender. Migrant men, concentrated in construction, manufacturing, and manual labor, face a quieter verge produced by deskilling, lost status, and the erosion of provider identities.

We also ask how AI is reshaping these conditions through algorithmic management, biometric border systems, and recruitment technologies that classify, rank, and sort migrant workers.

Rather than treat precarity as a uniform condition, the session conceptualizes "the verge" as a gendered social location through which migration redistributes risk, visibility, recognition, and vulnerability. We invite empirical, theoretical, and comparative papers examining how gender structures who is seen, who is silenced, and who carries the uneven weight of global mobility.

Keywords: migrant labor, gender and migration, LGBTQ migrants, masculinities, precarity, artificial intelligence

Session Organizers:

Tricia OKADA, Tamagawa University, Japan, tokada0628@gmail.com
Johanna ZULUETA, Toyo University, Japan, zulueta@toyo.jp

See more of: RC32 Women, Gender, and Society
See more of: RC31 Sociology of Migration
Back to: Full Group Listing