The Au Pair Imaginary: Examining the Intersection between Cultural Exchange and Reproductive Labour between Brazil and Germany.

This paper explores the intersection of cultural exchange and reproductive labour in the au pair programme, focusing on Brazil as the sending country and Germany as the receiving country. The informal and unregulated settings of the au pair programme in the German context allow for a broad spectrum of discourses to its promotion. These discourses are co-produced by various social actors and institutions across borders and maintain an ambivalence about the programme being mainly a cultural and language learning experience, disguising its labour aspect, which is performed primarily by migrant young women. Drawing on feminist theories of social reproduction, decolonial perspectives and ethnographic methods, the study seeks to challenge the categorisation of au pairs as a cultural exchange, through a comprehensive analysis of the different interests among the social actors involved (participants, host families, recruiters, etc.). The research also highlights how Brazilian women are increasingly navigating this market through social media platforms and how they build informative and supportive networks within this scenario of vulnerability while au pairing in Germany. The contribution of this research to the existing literature is to explore how cultural processes and social interactions shape the creation and maintenance of a cross-border labour market that does not initially appear as one.