Mobilizing the Suffering of the Body

Live-in care work has been historically an exploitative labour niche for migrant women in Spain. Drawing on interviews with domestic care workers in Spain during 2020, we document how the Covid crisis exacerbated existing patterns of labour extraction. The home lockdown amplified time, space and task fuzziness that characterize live-in care work. These workers’ bodies buffered the negative impacts of the crisis at a cost to their own wellbeing. We use a relational understanding of the body, as mindbody, that brings together physical and psycho-emotional experiences, dispositions, availabilities and skills to show how the embodied experiences of live-in domestic workers during lockdown relate to a labor extraction pattern that seeks to enhance the production of domestic workers’ availability. This accumulation strategy stems from a somatic hierarchization that classifies bodies according to class, gender and origin. Domestic migrant women also mobilized the suffering of their bodies to demand less exploitative labor conditions.