Care for Sale

Book excerpt: In homes and brothels around the world, migrant women are selling a unique commodity: care. Care for Sale is an in-depth ethnography of a group of middle-class women from Latin America who exchange care and intimacy for money while working as domestic and sex workers in London. Illuminating the complexities of care work, the book offers a detailed study of women's lives and working conditions. It considers how their experience of migration and intimate labor is one of rupture that both enables and forces them to gradually reconstitute themselves, in their host cities, as people quite distinct from their normal selves back home. Care for Sale illustrates the connections and the factors that contribute to migrant women choosing either domestic or sex work, including their concerns about money and morality. It moves away from a narrow focus on migration and labor to focus instead on the creation and (re)creation of persons; and on the ways in which people fashion themselves and cultivate difference, inequality, or commonality as part of their self-making projects. By doing this, the book shows migrants not only as economic actors, but also as individuals involved in an intimate process that constantly modifies their sense of morality and personhood. Care for Sale is a volume in the series ISSUES OF GLOBALIZATION: CASE STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY ANTHROPOLOGY, which examines the experiences of individual communities in our contemporary world. Each volume offers a brief and engaging exploration of a particular issue arising from globalization and its cultural, political, and economic effects on certain peoples or groups.