Tender Labour by Jennifer E. Shaw

In Tender Labour, Jennifer E. Shaw examines how maternal absence shapes care and kinship across distance. Based on fifteen months of ethnography in British Columbia, Shaw follows ten Filipino-Canadian young people whose mothers migrated to Canada as domestic workers, leaving them behind for at least four years before reunification. Shaw introduces the concept of tender labour to describe the practical caregiving tasks children perform—comforting siblings, managing households, translating languages, supporting parental emotions. Children emerge as active caregivers, innovating and reproducing care roles under conditions of separation. Rather than treating migration as rupture, Shaw portrays separation as an ongoing condition and reunification as a site of dislocation. Framing children as affective labourers who sustain moral economies of care, Shaw challenges binary notions of presence and absence.