Tale of Two Citizenships? Citizenship, Migration and Care in the European Union

Abstract

This paper examines the normative content of European Union citizenship with the aid of recent feminist research into gendered citizenship, care and migration. Feminist literature shows how long-standing feminist issues around care and domestic work are now made more prominent by the increasing formal employment of European women and the corresponding involvement of female migrant workers, often with precarious legal status, in performing childcare and domestic tasks in Europe. The literature on this phenomenon can be used to bring together two kinds of marginalisation built into Union citizenship – the explicit exclusion of those who are not Union citizens and the more implicit barriers that are based on a gendered division of labour. While optimistic analyses of Union citizenship assume its current limitations can be overcome, feminist research into gendered citizenship, care and migration actually shows they are part and parcel of how Union citizenship is currently conceived, making it difficult to change.