Bodily Burdens: Physical Abuse, Workplace Injury, and Understanding Intersectionality through the Experiences of African Immigrant Direct Care Health Workers

Abstract

This article uses Leith Mullings’s intersectional approach to health disparities combined with a novel focus on the impact of direct care jobs on workers’ bodies in order to illuminate the everyday experiences of African immigrant direct health care workers in the Greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area. The research for this article is based on thirty interviews with African immigrant direct care workers conducted in 2014. Specifically, by examining direct care workers’ experiences of being physically and verbally abused by patients, and by exploring the impact of extremely high rates of physical injury on the job, this article aims to show the bodily burdens, the physical embodied costs, that direct care workers bear and carry for the larger society related to caring for the elderly and cognitively and physically disabled patients. A focus on the body shows how American labor sectors, including direct care, are shaped by racialized and gendered social orders that immigrants must face after their arrival in the United States.