Vol. 41 No. 3 (2026) Articles
By Hadia Akhtar Khan
How do men claim recognition and compensation for their care labor? When a rural economy shifts from agriculture toward international migration, joint households send some sons abroad to work and ask others to stay in the village to take care of the household’s land, women, and kinship obligations. The men who stay argue that this work of “taking care” should be recognized and compensated with half of a migrant brother’s earnings. Drawing on ethnographic research with transnational households in migrant-sending villages in northwestern Pakistan, I examine how men who stay in the village invoke caste, gender, and kinship to claim recognition and compensation for their care labor. While these claims may resemble feminist critiques of the undervaluation of care labor vis-à-vis waged labor in capitalism, the article shows the limits of the politics of recognition of care as labor.
labor; care; kinship; caste; gender; social reproduction; migration
Copyright (c) 2026 Hadia Akhtar Khan
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
