UC Davis

I examine what I call the governance of care, the policies, politics, and policy formation processes that organize and distribute the resources, relationships, and labor necessary to maintain life. This includes health care, housing, water, food, and other forms of essential economic relief. By governance, I mean not only formal policies, but also legislative debates, media, and cultural discourses that surround this formation. I analyze the governance of care through the experiences of immigrant women and women of color who, under the global flows of neoliberal racial capitalism, perform paid and unpaid reproductive labor in order for societies in the Global North to function and maintain racialized and gendered hierarchies. I look specifically at immigrant women who live and work in the Silicon Valley, and situate myself within the COVID-19 pandemic, which has exacerbated the need for reproductive labor. By examining how the governance of care is lived, particularly through the narratives of immigrant women workers and women of color, I, thus, look at not only who is able to live and die, but I examine who must die in order for others to live. Drawing from scholars rooted in social reproduction, racial capitalism, and critical immigration studies, I examine the necropolitics and the biopolitics that shape the governance of care, and how racialized and gendered images reinforce the exploitation of immigrant women and women of color.