A “Prison of Love”: Exploitation and the promotion of “care ethics” for female care workers in China

January 23, 2019
4:00 pmto5:00 pm

UO geographer Yi Yu, the 2017-18 CSWS Jane Grant Dissertation Fellow, will give a presentation on her research titled “Prison of Love:” Exploitation and the promotion of “care ethics” for female care workers in China. The talk will take place on Wednesday, January 23 at 4 pm in the EMU Miller Room.

Yi Yu

This talk is free and open to the public. It kicks off the 2019 UO LERC Labor Research Colloquium.  The Colloquium brings together faculty and graduate students from a wide range of disciplines to focus on issues of economic justice and power relations in the workplace.  Ms. Yu’s talk links feminist geography with emotional labor, guilty feelings and the promotion of professional “ethics” in a critical examination of gendered labor. 

The full talk description follows below:

Yi Yu, PhD, Department of Geography
A “Prison of Love”:  Exploitation and the promotion of “care ethics” for female care workers in China.

Feminist geographers and employers alike have called for an ethics of attentiveness, responsibility, and responsiveness in care work.  But how do these demands for intensive emotional labor shape the working conditions – and the self-concept – of the women who do this work?  This talk reports on empirical research in Shanghai and Beijing to challenge the call for low-wage, high-guilt emotional labor.