Social Reproduction, Governmentality and Resilience: Unpaid food work of first-generation immigrant women in the community

Abstract

Community work involving first-generation immigrant (FGI) women, though indispensable for many non-profit organizations, needs nuanced discussion in academic and policy conversations. My research centers on FGI women’s volunteer work in food-based non-profits, including food banks and community food organizations. I use the interdisciplinary concepts of social reproduction, governmentality and resilience to understand the intersectional nuances that arise in the lived experiences and situated knowledges of FGI women community volunteers. I center Black, Indigenous, migrant and other marginalized feminist scholarship to contextualize first-generation immigrant food work. I juxtapose this scholarship and my field learnings against my own positionality and geographies of space and place. This includes both my caste privilege, model minority immigrant status and settler privileges and my marginalization as a racialized woman, mother and first-generation immigrant with limited social capital. I present three key learnings from my research:1. Migration stories are intersectional, and reasons to volunteer can be varied and informed by both personal choices and socio-economic structures like family, religion, ethnicity, institutions, local and federal governments; 2. Governmentality plays a key role in influencing FGI women’s community social reproduction and the feminization of non-profit food advocacy organizations; 3. FGI women and other workers in the non-profit food sectors show resilience and resistance in reorganizing and negotiating systemic barriers posed by the precarious environment, including funding issues, spatial constraints, and the transitional nature of care work. In certain aspects of social reproduction, I observed the existence of temporary activities that often get subsumed under broadly defined activities of cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare, volunteering, advocacy, etc. I call it transience in social reproduction. This transience was seen in sudden, unexpected requirements of care carried out within social reproduction activities, like picking up a neighbour’s child from school, along with one’s own; the children wanting to play in the school park while you mind them. These requirements of care are fluid, temporary and episodic, but part of social reproduction labour.