Distorted Emancipation and the Transnational Political Economy of Social Reproduction.

The chapter elaborates a critical analysis of the role of borders in the marketization of care and a European care border regime, which creates a structural position of the low-paid mobile European guest care worker, who are commonly migrant women from Central and Eastern EU member states. Through an investigation of recent care disputes, highlighted by the pandemic in borderscapes of the Central Europe, it analyses how the political economy of borders maintains an undervaluation of care and works to delay a care crisis in global capitalism, or specifically how this care crisis is experienced in wealthier countries. Moreover, the chapter offers a critical account of care nationalism and nuanced layers of power hierarchies within the concept of whiteness as a global position of privilege and how they are played out between differently positioned groups of women. The author argues that an interplay between the gendered structures of the division of labour and commodification and marketisation of care in global capitalism leads to ‘distorted emancipation’ of women. Distorted emancipation does not reconfigure gendered division of labour, moreover it makes ‘liberation’ of geopolitically and economically privileged groups of women contingent on the exploitation and oppression of geopolitically and economically disadvantaged groups of women and complicit with reproducing global structural vulnerabilities of women.