ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on narratives of women working as migrant nurses in the city of Kolkata and their embodied experience of being objectified as a foreign ‘other’. Given the increasing migration of women health workers from impoverished countries in the South to the Global North, local labour markets in host countries are struggling with a deficit of trained nurses. This deficit is met with an increasing employment of unregistered nurses and nursing aides. Through a case study of nurses and their conditions of employment in Kolkata, this chapter demonstrates that private hospitals are increasingly dependent on young migrant workers to work temporarily as trained personnel before they further migrate abroad. It argues that the hostility faced by migrant women in the city/workplace is deeply sexual, casteist, and racial in nature, given that the objectification of the single migrant women draws from a deeply entrenched wider set of relations of power, where labels of promiscuity serve to reinforce ethnic, class, caste, or national divides. This chapter explores how the notion of ‘hospitality’ or ‘welcome’ becomes a threshold through which the guest/migrant is assimilated within host cultures. Hospitality becomes an apparatus by which thresholds are policed: who is welcome and who is not, and on what terms?
