Search

The article explores the complex experiences and positions of migrant women in the ‘nursing profession’ in a southern European country, Greece. It looks at ways in which a rudimentary welfare state and a large informal economy have created the demand for les infirmières exclusives and for ‘quasi-nurses’. The supply and use of their services, on the one hand, helps perpetuate this informal welfare system and, on the other, has implications for migrant women themselves as, inter alia, it contributes to their deskilling, exploitation, marginalization and exclusion. The multifarious degrees and forms that these processes take, to a large extent, depend on the cross-cutting of gender, ethnicity and class, as sexism intersects with different forms of ‘othering’ and racialization processes in the destination country. The position of these women is also located in terms of ethnic and national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article concentrates on the rapid growth of trafficking in women from Eastern and Central Europe who end up working in the sex industry in Athens. Such movement of people is constituted around global networks of female labour. The social processes and mechanisms that produce and reproduce the somatic and social exploitation of female migrants caught in the web of the sex industry are analysed. These processes are responsible for a continuation and accentuation of women's loss of power to represent their interests, to seek viable economic alternatives. The living and working spaces of these women rest upon their isolation and individuation and total control of their everyday activities. Ethnicity, age and racialized exclusions all intersect with sexist relations and practices within Greek society and the ethnic communities under study. The interplay of these processes operates differently within different ethnic groups of women to produce different outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]