Les Infirmieres Exclusives and Migrant Quasi-Nurses in Greece

The article explores the complex experiences and positions of migrant women in the`nursing profession' in a southern European country, Greece. It looks at ways inwhich a rudimentary welfare state and a large informal economy have created thedemand for les infirmières exclusives and for `quasi-nurses'.The supply and use of their services, on the one hand, helps perpetuate thisinformal welfare system and, on the other, has implications for migrant womenthemselves as, inter alia, it contributes to their deskilling, exploitation,marginalization and exclusion. The multifarious degrees and forms that theseprocesses take, to a large extent, depend on the cross-cutting of gender, ethnicityand class, as sexism intersects with different forms of `othering' and racializationprocesses in the destination country. The position of these women is also located interms of ethnic and national boundaries