Abstract
This chapter explores the ways in which the care of the elderly in home settings in Saudi Arabia involves ongoing reformulations of home and family, as well as the increasing negotiation of forms of intimate labor between citizens and migrant women in that country. Specifically, we draw together two bodies of recent research: Elyas’s (2011) study of the care of the elderly in Saudi Arabia and Johnson’s (2010) and his late colleague Alicia Pingol’s (2010) study of migrant Filipino Muslims living and working in that country.1 We show how encounters between Saudi and Filipino women in this caregiving situation are concurrently shaped by a number of processes: kinship, gender and generational dynamics in Saudi Arabia and the Philippines, Saudi and Filipino women’s mobilities and their changing relational positions across the life course, the different legal and economic status that each woman occupies, and the invocation of Islam in Saudi and Filipino women’s talk about and negotiations of intimate labor within the home.
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© 2014 Bina Fernandez and Marina de Regt
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Elyas, N., Johnson, M. (2014). Caring for the Future in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In: Fernandez, B., de Regt, M. (eds) Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137482112_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137482112_7
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