Servants of Globalization offers a groundbreaking study of migrant Filipino domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the caretaking work of the global economy. Since its initial publication, the book has informed countless students and scholars and set the research agenda on labor migration and transnational families. With this second edition, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas returns to Rome and Los Angeles to consider how the migrant communities have changed. Children have now joined their parents. Male domestic workers are present in significantly greater numbers. And, perhaps most troubling, the population has aged, presenting new challenges for the increasingly elderly domestic workers. New chapters discuss these three increasingly important constituencies. The entire book has been revised and updated, and a new introduction offers a global, comparative overview of the citizenship status of migrant domestic workers. Servants of Globalization remains the defining work on the international division of reproductive labor.

The Force of Domesticity offers fresh perspectives on the complex linkages of gender and globalization that connect the world today. Through a multi-site analysis of Filipino women, Parreas shows how domesticity, remittances, and NGO and state-imposed notions of morality conspire to create new structures of inequalities and opportunities for transnational migrant women. --Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Domestica Taking as her subjects migrant Filipina domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles, transnational migrant families in the Philippines, and Filipina migrant entertainers in Tokyo, Parreas documents the social, cultural, and political pressures that maintain womens domesticity in migration, as well as the ways migrant women and their children negotiate these adversities. Parreas examines the underlying constructions of gender in neoliberal state regimes, export-oriented economies such as that of the Philippines, protective migration laws, and the actions and decisions of migrant Filipino women in maintaining families and communities, raising questions about gender relations, the status of women in globalization, and the meanings of greater consumptive power that migration garners for women. The Force of Domesticity starkly illustrates how the operation of globalization enforces notions of womens domesticity and creates contradictory messages about womens place in society, simultaneously pushing women inside and outside the home.

"With an ethnographer's ear and a social critic's lens, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas illuminates the care deficit of the immigrant second generation, the children of transnational Filipino families left behind by mothers and fathers who labor in the global economy."--Eileen Boris, University of California, Santa Barbara

This book advances debates over the relationship between care and economy through the concept of intimate labor—care, domestic, and sex work—and thus charts relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the context of global economic transformations.

An “excellent” ethnography that “reveal[s] the global implications of the US morality on international policies and migrant workers” (Cristina Firpo, International Review of Modern Sociology). In 2004, the US State Department declared Filipina hostesses in Japan the largest group of sex trafficked persons in the world. Since receiving this global attention, the number of hostesses entering Japan has dropped by nearly 90 percent. To some, this might suggest a victory for the global anti-trafficking campaign, but Rhacel Parreñas counters that this drastic decline—which stripped thousands of migrants of their livelihoods—is a setback. Parreñas worked alongside hostesses in a working-class club in Tokyo’s red-light district, serving drinks and entertaining her customers. While the common assumption has been that these hostess bars are hotbeds of sexual trafficking, Parreñas quickly discovered a different world of working migrant women, there by choice, and, most importantly, where none were coerced into prostitution. Illicit Flirtations calls into question the US policy to broadly label these women as sex trafficked. It highlights how in imposing top-down legal constraints to solve the perceived problems—including laws that push dependence on migrant brokers and measures that criminalize undocumented migrants—many women become more vulnerable to exploitation, not less. This book gives a long overdue look into the real world of those labeled as trafficked. “A highly readable and informative book.” —Ko-lin Chin, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books “A nuanced portrayal. . . . Scholars and policy-makers should take note.” —Viviana A. Zelizer, Princeton University, author of Purchase of Intimacy and Economic Lives: How Culture Shapes the Economy “An extraordinary book.” —Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of A Sociology of Globalization

Based on fieldwork in ten Asian countries, this book examines cross-national patterns and the impact of globalization, state policies, individual autonomy, and social factors on various women's international migration.