We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Contesting "Institute Nanny Motherhood": The Emotional Labor of Childcare Workers in a Contemporary Chinese State-run Orphanage.
- Authors
Linliang Qian
- Abstract
In the domestic media and official reports, Chinese institute nannies are always being portrayed as "loving nanny mothers" who selflessly devote all their love and care to the institutionalized children. In contrast, some Western media and human rights organizations denounce them as demoralized and inhumane caregivers who neglect and abuse institutionalized children. As these two extremist representations dominate Chinese and Western public discourses, the actual working experience, everyday life and emotions of Chinese institute nannies are largely ignored. What are their relationships with institutionalized children really like? How do these relationships affect their own life experiences? And how do these relationships affect the lives of institutionalized children? This article attempts to answer these questions. Based on my six-month fieldwork in a child welfare institute in southeast China, I argue that, like other jobs in the service sector, institute nannies' emotional labor constrains, but also produces emotions, of and on the nannies' bodies. These emotions include their attachment to many institutionalized children for whom they care, their serious attitude toward the children who have done wrong, their ambivalence in doing this job, and even their identification with the distinctive "institute nanny motherhood". While this empirically-grounded new type of "motherhood" extends the existing academic research on motherhood studies by breaking up the traditionally assumed spatial and occupational differentiations, and illustrating a unique working experience of "mothering as a paid job in the workplace"; the process of institute nannies' emotional labor adds a dynamic dimension to Arlie Hochschild's notion of "emotional labor," and also corrects its bias, which sees the work of emotional labor only as a false performance, by taking the self-identity of workers to justify the authenticity of their emotional expressions in the workplace. This ethnographic study first examines the institute nannies' working conditions in my field site. It shows that the job of institute nanny is highly gendered and socially stratified in local society. These female caregivers with rural backgrounds suffer from low salary, overloaded work, delayed overtime payment as well as no public holiday or medical leave, but they are required by their work unit, the Chinese government and the public to devote themselves to childcare work by "mothering the foundlings as their own children". Facing such high expectations along with poor working conditions, the institute nannies become ambivalent. Refusing to be socialist model workers who have to be self-sacrificing, they complain and negotiate with the welfare institute leaders to protect their own interests, but at the same still gradually develop their attachment to the institutionalized children for whom they care through intensive childrearing practices. I provide a detailed description of the physical and emotional nurturing processes, through which the deep emotional bond between the nannies and children is built, and furthermore, the self-identity of "institute nanny mother" based on their own definition is constructed. Still, in the course of nurturing these children, frequently intervened in by the welfare institute and the volunteers, and considering their own interests, the nannies often feel contradictory, especially regarding the issue of disciplining children. Whether or not to discipline children, when to do it, and what the rationality behind disciplinary actions is, all become problems they have to deal with. Furthermore, the intimacy between the nannies and the institutionalized children will eventually be cut off by adoptions or other kinds of separations, because the welfare institute and the public all assume that a "normal" family will provide the children with more love and care, and therefore is a better choice for them. This causes the nannies serious emotional exhaustion. Later sections of this ethnographic study offer moving stories about how the nannies deal with the emotional challenges of working as "institute nanny mothers." These stories not only demonstrate the contesting experiences of these childcare workers, but also reveal the production and running of emotion and identity in a specific institution.
- Subjects
NANNIES; CAREGIVERS; CHILD welfare; MOTHERHOOD; LABOR
- Publication
Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, 2013, Vol 11, Issue 2, p147
- ISSN
1727-1878
- Publication type
Article