Migrant Domestic Workers as Disposable Kin in Global Capitalism'S Care Economy

This dissertation examines the economic, emotional, and relational harms suffered by migrant domestic workers under global capitalism. These harms are systemic, stemming from labor and migration regimes designed to sustain capital accumulation in the care economy. Affluent regions benefit from the labor of migrant domestic workers at the expense of damage to their fundamental relationships. The result is the erosion of workers' kinship ties, rendering them "disposable kin" in the eyes of those who profit economically and emotionally from their work. The study is organized into four chapters. The first explores how global care chains are structured through labor and migration regimes that prioritize employers' access to cheap care work. The second demonstrates how undocumented domestic work economically and emotionally sustains households and corporations in wealthy regions. It positions this labor as an underground economy of capitalist accumulation. The third investigates the commodification of affect in domestic work. It shows how the role of migrant nannies as "shadow mothers" produces profound affective alienation and losses across both workplace and family life. The fourth examines how these harms reinforce racial hierarchies. It argues that global care chains are neocolonial structures that normalize the disposability of workers' constitutive relationships. In summary, this dissertation provides a structural analysis of how the transnational domestic labor market sustains the prosperity of wealthy regions at the cost of eroding the relationships essential to the well-being of people in the global periphery.