The Backstage of the Care EconomyEdition 1

***Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2025***

‘Reveals the causes and consequences behind the explosion of migrant care work. A remarkable contribution from one of the leading social scientists of gender, care and migration in Europe’ Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Princeton University

‘A tour-de-force distillation of radical social thought on domestic labour grounded in critiques of global capitalism’ Heidi Gottfried, co-editor of Global Labor Migration

What is it like to care for another family, while yours remains in a different country? In today’s capitalist society, migrant women performing care work in private households experience the painful tension of caring for both, often under precarious conditions.

Characterised as the ‘backstage’ family, the carer’s remote relationship with their loved ones at home is often purely digital, with the double dilemmas of migrant motherhood and stay-behind fathers – exposing the pitfalls of transnational employment relations and the growth of social inequality.

Here, Helma Lutz explores the debates around this issue, focusing on carers from Eastern Europe working in the West. She unpacks questions around feminist critiques of capitalism and the commodification of emotional labour, exploring how gender justice and the search for socialist feminist utopias can shape how we see a future – not only for the improvement of the carers’ working and living conditions but also for a new way of dealing with care work.

Helma Lutz is a sociologist and Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. For many years she was the Acting Director of the Cornelia Goethe Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the author of The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy.