The paper focuses on the social situation and social practices of female care migrants (at the age of 50 and above) from the South Moravia (the region of Mikulov, Břeclav) who migrate for work to Austria as domestic workers-caregivers for seniors at regular intervals (circular migration). The main aim of the text is to argue that translocal female migrants paradoxically perceive their labour migration as a specific form of emancipation, despite the fact that they work in the so-called live-in-service jobs (where they live and work in private households) and often experience indignity. While in Austria they work in gendered and very demanding jobs with low wages, circular care migration provides them with the possibility to extend their gender power in the transforming Czech society. There is thus a paradox in that while they are marginalized in Austria, they are empowered on the Czech side of the border. This is achieved through paid reproductive work and better access to income, which leads to personal consumption based on their own interests and overall personal benefit. Special attention is paid to new forms of translocal care chains and new forms of these women’s partner cohabitation (living apart together).
The paper relects on the gender speciic nature of private and public spheres as discussed in feminist discourses in European and American contexts. Its aim is to explore the potential of the concepts of public and private in analysing the issue of reconciliation of work and family, connected with women’ presence in the public sphere, with the hierarchy between the public and private and with the gender power asymmetry. he public and private as analytical constructs are helpful in moving beyond the individual level and understanding the social-political structure and historical context. These categories characterize diferent value systems with a hierarchical relation connected with the construction of ‘two genders’ and gendered division of work. he paper also focuses on the concept of women’s emancipation, its justiication and understanding of equality, and concrete changes in women’s life. Women’s experience of their ‘double existence’ in the public and private life is thematized as a question of reconciliation of work and family with some period particularities. Diferences in forming men’s and women’s identiies during modernity depending on their experience in the two diferent worlds are shown as relevant., Zuzana Kiczková., Poznámky na s. 23, Obsahuje bibliografii, and Abstrakt anglicky
The aim of this paper is to discuss theoretical approaches of gender role studies in the context of immigration. In the first part of this paper are defined three interrelated aspects of an immigrant's social experience: representation of culture; social location and marginality; idealized cultural identities. The main part of this paper focuses on a minority group of Indian immigrants in the USA. A few Indian mythological stories (The myth of Ekalaivya, The story of Pativirda and Pattini) help us to understand the specifics of Indian culture (the social class differences and the cast system). The second part of this paper focuses on the gender role of Indian men and women in the context of immigration. Some authors propose an intersectionality perspective for the study of gender, which argues for the need to study gender in relation to race, ethnicity, social class and sexual orientation. The last part of this paper describes the results of R. Mahalingam's research of gender roles of second-generation Indian women. Finally, some of the results of R. Mahalingam's research are compared to the results with similar methodological framework which was done in the Czech Republic in 2004.
The paper shows affinity between cyberfeminism and thinking of J. Butler. The first part sums up Butler's texts. The identity is an effect of a repetition of subjectivation practices transmitted by the society. The materiality of the body and the structure of the mind are not conditions but consequences of culture, which are retrospectively naturalized. It's not possible to resist the power from a position of an autonomous subject because subject itself is a product of knowledge-power. The only possible subversion acts from within the power network showing the relativity of the subjectivation practices by means of irony and parody. Cyberfeminism is not a unified paradigm but a network of activities in art, culture, theory and technology. The differences between nature, culture and technology are disappearing today. Animals, humans and machines are melting together to cyborgs - computer-humans. The cyborg-metaphore is an ironic political myth, subverting the foundations of modernity. The obvious artificial and floating identity of a cyborg is (similar to Butler's theory) produced by inscriptions of culture-science-technology showing the relativity of ''natural essence'' and ''autonomous subject''.