Not only men but also migrants in non-traditional occupations

Domestic labour is considered a typical female job, and due to the arrival of large female migration flows to Italy, it has experienced a massive ethnicized connotation, peculiar of this sector. This paper focuses on how a double and subaltern condition of belonging to a “minority group” affects gender perceptions of male migrant domestic workers and how they construct their masculinity. This research is based on a comparison between 54 interviews with male and female migrant domestic workers drawing on an intersectional approach based on gender and nationality. It shows how moving across borders, living in a host society and working in a non-traditional job can reshape male immigrants’ gender-division perceptions, often in contradictory and unexpected ways. It also emerges how the “racial glass escalator” allows reaffirmation of characteristics tied to the privileges of masculinity and furnishes an important and useful framework in which to analyse the experience of men in ‘female’ occupations.