Social reproduction and feminized platform labor: Care, domestic work, and migrant Agency in Madrid and Milan

This article examines the rise of domestic and care work platforms in Southern European cities, focusing on Madrid and Milan as relational contexts where platform capitalism intersects with enduring crises of social reproduction, migration regimes, and gendered labor precarity. Drawing on Social Reproduction Theory and an intersectional analytical lens, the study unpacks how digital platforms mediate the commodification, fragmentation, and spatial reorganization of reproductive labor. Empirically, it combines multi-sited ethnography, semi-structured interviews with migrant women workers, and digital platform analysis to trace how platformization exploits and reconfigures pre-existing informal care economies historically sustained by racialized migrant labor. The findings reveal that platforms, while promising formalization and professionalization, often deepen precarity by leveraging border regimes, creating stratified access to work, and externalizing risks onto workers. These dynamics multiply gendered spaces of vulnerability, exposing women to new forms of violence across fragmented urban and digital geographies. Simultaneously, the paper foregrounds diverse forms of migrant women's agency, including informal strategies of mutual aid, knowledge-sharing through digital networks, and collective organizing embedded in longstanding grassroots movements. By situating the platformization of domestic labor within broader transformations of urban life and welfare retrenchment, the article advances critical debates on the feminization of platform labor and the infrastructures of social reproduction. It argues that these platforms are not only technological intermediaries but infrastructural actors reshaping the conditions of life and work. The study underscores the importance of recognizing and supporting migrant workers' everyday practices of resistance as crucial sites of political possibility amid deepening neoliberal restructuring.