The Unhappy Marriage of Care and the Global Market: ‘Soft Backsliding’ in the Narratives of Two Romanian Badanti

This paper encompasses an analysis of the novels written by two Romanian badanti who emigrated from Eastern Europe to Italy at the beginning of the 21st century, namely Liliana Nechita (Romania) and Lilia-Bicec Zanardelli (the Republic of Moldova). The reading grid of these narratives is a Marxist feminist one, as it continues the analytical framework of Lise Vogel and links it to the last decades’ “new gender arrangement” (Lutz) that emphasises the outsourcing of reproductive labour towards migrant and gendered labour-power. The work of these badanti partakes in the global care chain of our world-system, which privileges families in the West and affects poor households in the East. The novels written by the two workers show how agents directly involved in this global division of labour explain their own history, as it is shaped by their new working experience. However, their literary inquiry will circumscribe a contradictory rhetoric, also called “soft backsliding”, that combines emancipatory insights with reactionary ideologies related to the nation-state, family and Christianity. This study aims to explain them as both methods of subjective subsistence in capitalism and a virtual path to political radicalization.