CONCEPT
Global Care Chain
Hochschild's term for the <em>international flow of feminized care labor</em> from poorer communities to wealthier ones — now extended by AI companion platforms whose emotional proletariat is concentrated in the Global South.
The global care chain is Hochschild's framework for tracing how care labor — child care, elder care, domestic work, emotional support — flows transnationally from poorer women to wealthier households. A Filipino nanny cares for an American child while her own children are cared for by a grandmother in Manila; an Eastern European home-health worker tends an elderly German client while leaving aging parents at home. Each link in the chain involves the substitution of one woman's care for another's, with care flowing upward in the economic hierarchy and the deficit borne furthest from the sites of greatest wealth. The AI age has extended the chain into new territory: AI companion platforms concentrate their hidden emotional labor in Kenya, the Philippines, and other Global South sites where women perform the intimacy the machine appears to generate.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Hochschild introduced the concept in her 2000 essay "Global Woman" and developed it further in her 2003 collection of the same
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