ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that migrants’ working lives and the relationships established through paid work also often become part of their intimate lives, particularly in some of the jobs that women migrants take up, such as live-in elderly care or child-minding. Intimate relations with partners, children, and the people migrants care for at work shape how migrants experience migration. These intimate relations bring global inequalities and unequal structures of opportunity at both origin and destination to bear on migrants’ most personal relationships, what they experience, and what they feel about the changes. Looking into migrants’ intimate lives also sheds some light on their views on gender inequality in relation to domestic violence. Work is one of the spheres where migrants may forge intimate relations. Migration is closely related to greater sexual freedom both in terms of the migrants themselves, but also for those who stay behind. Most interviewees who talked about sexuality linked migration to greater sexual availability and sexual freedom.
