Abstract
The au pair scheme is not intended as a migration route, yet it often becomes precisely this. This chapter explores au pairs’ intimate relations and their potential to facilitate access to formal as well as informal citizenship. By drawing on au pairs’ narratives of dating and their relations to host families, the chapter maps au pairs’ access to citizenship. This is highly gendered, and intertwined with their personal and intimate relationships with host families/employers, as well as with partners or potential partners. Yet, while narratives of dating suggest a greater degree of agency for au pairs compared to their dependence on host families for formal and informal citizenship, it still entails a sense of cruel optimism as citizenship is always governed from above.
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Notes
- 1.
In 2012, 54 % of the 810 former au pairs who returned to Norway received student visas; 6 % received working visas; and 40 % returned on a family reunification visa (statistics from the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, retrieved via personal communication 15.11.2013).
- 2.
The empirical material was produced as part of the research project ‘Buying and Selling Gender Equality. Feminised Migration and (Gender) Equality in Contemporary Norway’, financed by the Research Council of Norway.
- 3.
In the analysis, I discuss ‘au pairs’, ‘host families’, ‘host mums’, and ‘host dads’. My use of these terms does not imply that I believe their description of the relationships they refer to is in any way unambiguous. Rather, they attempt to create what they describe, as pointed out by Gullikstad and Annfelt (this volume).
- 4.
People from the EU/Schengen Area are not formally part of the au pair scheme because of current migration regulations. They have to register upon arrival in Norway, but are not obliged to use the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration’s formal au pair contract. My informants who came from EU/Schengen countries nevertheless self-identified as au pairs, used the formal contract, or travelled through an agency that used a version of this contract.
- 5.
Personal communication with the UDI, 15.11.2013.
- 6.
To protect my informants’ identities I have chosen not to specify the countries they travelled from.
- 7.
See Marchetti (this volume) for a discussion of different forms of maternalism in female employers’ relationships with their domestic workers.
- 8.
Sonya was referring to the terrorist who attacked the Workers’ Youth League camp at Utøya and the government quarters in Oslo on the 22 July 2011.
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Stubberud, E. (2016). From Intimate Relations to Citizenship? Au Pairing and the Potential for Citizenship in Norway. In: Gullikstad, B., Kristensen, G., Ringrose, P. (eds) Paid Migrant Domestic Labour in a Changing Europe. Citizenship, Gender and Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51742-5_6
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