Gender, migration and domestic work: Space and the time in the discourse of albanian domestic workers in Athens

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between gender and migration from theperspective of everyday life. It is based on a series of focus group discussions withAlbanian women who work in the domestic sector. The analysis explores the genderedways in which these women describe, discuss and evaluate their personal experiences ofspace and time. Although there is a great diversity in these experiences, their discourseis dominated by the fact that their everyday life has been overtaken by the space andtime of domestic work. The paper argues that the impact of this overtaking is twofold:on the one hand, it accounts for the isolation that Albanian domestic workers oftenexperience as migrants in a foreign country, but also for their unequal position aswomen within the Albanian family; on the other hand, however, it also leads to aquestioning of gender stereotypes that prevail in both the country of origin and thehost country, as the limits between paid and unpaid, private and public, male andfemale space and time are being challenged.