Transnational Dimensions of Social Reproduction: Georgian Migrant Women in Turkey

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of a group of Georgian migrant women who work as live-in domestic labourers in Istanbul. Drawing from feminist political economy, and with the extended application of Marxist concepts, it aims to explore macro- and micro-structural circumstances around Georgian migrant women’s entry into the feminized global labour force. Through interviews about the daily lives and migration stories of participants, this dissertation represents a historically and culturally situated mapping of the trajectory of the commodification of Georgian migrant women’s social reproductive labour. Tracing the implications of women’s paid and unpaid work at household and transnational levels, it sheds light on the persistence of transnational reorganization and reinterpretation of how social reproductive work contributes to capital accumulation. In this context, historical connections and each country’s cultural practices are sources of material and ideological conditions which ambivalently shape, constrict, and inform migrant women’s agency.