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Capitalism, Gender, and Work

Paper Session

Sunday, Jan. 8, 2023 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (CST)

J.W. Marriott New Orleans, Endymion
Hosted By: Union for Radical Political Economics & International Association for Feminist Economics
  • Chair: Sarah Small, Rutgers University

Femininity and Care Work

Duc Hien Nguyen
,
University of Massachusetts Amherst

Abstract

In this paper, I offer an expanded critique of the association between femininity and care. In both mainstream care theories and feminist care theories, the ideal care worker is always kind, warm, nurturing, soft-spoken, attentive, and emotionally sensitive. This association between femininity and care is built upon a white, bourgeoise ideology of womanhood from which people of color, especially black and migrant women, as well as poor people and nonbinary/transgender people are excluded. As such, deconstructing gender from care requires us to overcome the racism, individualism, and heteronormativity constitutive of the gendered ideology of care. Failure to do so risks reinforcing care with women and only women. To empirically demonstrate the entanglement of care and femininity, I use the public-use sample from Wave III-V of the Adolescent to Adult Health Survey. Using a machine-learning gender diagnostic technique, I measure of femininity independent of reported sexes and show that this measure has a strong positive association with working in care occupations. For female workers, one standard deviation increase in femininity score is associated with 2 percentage point increase in the likelihood of being a care worker, equivalent to 5% increase over the baseline. However, femininity does not have any strong correlation for male care workers. The empirical result challenges Julie Nelson (2016)’s proposal to invoke a masculine notion of care through the practice of husbandry. As an alternative, I propose a nonbinary approach to care inspired by trans/queer theories. Instead of focusing on improving individual’s skills and capacities, we must think of care as relation-building, as weaving a network that connects us in the wake of profound physical, emotional, and psychological trauma.

Crises and Change in Social Reproduction: The Greenhouse, Women and the Rural Change in Western Anatolia, Turkey

Zeynep Ceren Eren Benlisoy
,
Sabanci University-Turkey

Abstract

This paper focuses on the particular intersection of crises and change in gender- and generation- based social reproduction with a large-scale land grab and investment from a feminist perspective. Based on a case study, it interrogates peasant-worker women’s laboring experiences and practices as waged labor in a large-scale and export-oriented agribusiness called the Greenhouse in Bakırçay Basin, Western Anatolia. I investigate the reasons why women seem to be determined to continue their job at the Greenhouse while keeping their distance from their previous life of being small-producer and agricultural laborers. In this sense, there are three interrelated dynamics taken into account: (i) women’s perceptions of and evaluations on being peasant vs. being worker, (ii) their future prospects on small-scale agricultural production and husbandry as well as young generations’ participation to those activities in the region and finally (iii) the niches women create to transform and change their lives via the Greenhouse work with critical reference to empowerment. With the aim to draw a better picture of gender- and generation- based change of the rural Basin, that is crystallized in women’s tendency towards paid labor at the Greenhouse as well as in their desires, aspirations, thoughts and dreams about their lives and futures, this article underlines the significance of women’s agency as a constitutive force within the change and crises of social reproduction in the Basin.

A Marxist Critique of Social Reproduction Theory

Paddy Quick
,
Union for Radical Political Economics

Abstract

Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), while usefully drawing attention to the important category of household production, does so in ways that conflict with fundamental Marxist theoretical propositions. These begin with its assertion that wage-laborers are paid for the labor they perform, rather than receiving in wages what is necessary for the reproduction of the working class as a whole. The paper “unpacks” the multiple social relations of production, gender, and age embodied in terms such as “women’s unpaid reproductive labor” and reserves the term “unpaid labor” for the surplus labor carried out by wage-laborers. Unlike SRT, Marxist theory allows for an exploration of the determinants of the division of the labor of the working class between household labor, the labor used for petty-commodity production, and wage labor as distinct from, but related to, the division of labor within these categories by gender and age.

The Second Shift Meets the Market: An Evaluation of Household Labor's Price in Germany

Julia Francesca Engel
,
Kiel University

Abstract

It has been well-documented that in spite of traditional gender roles slowly becoming obsolete, women in households still carry most of the burden of unpaid house- and care work. While the (un)fairness of the conceptual distinction between paid and unpaid work has been widely discussed by philosophers and gender studies scholars, we seek to quantify the loss of income due to time investment into housework instead of paid labor. In economics, previous research centered around detecting mechanisms behind the unequal distribution of housework between partners (Gwozdz and Sousa-Poza, 2010), the extensive margin of labor force participation (Kleven et al, 2009). This paper extends the analysis by considering how different households (single, co-habiting, and married) spend their time and proposes a lower-bound valuation of how this time is used. To estimate the value of household production, we opt for a replacement wage approach, e.g. market values for clearing services and childcare. Moreover, we distinguish between two situations. On one hand, there is a propensity for employed women to take on the “second shift” and perform additional work at home with no pay (Hochschild and Machung, 1989). On the other hand, some women might decide to drop out of the labor force altogether in order to specialize in housework (Becker, 1965). We examine the distribution and value of time spent on unpaid labor across different income groups, with emphasis on lower income households who have fewer possibilities to outsource labor to the market. As an underlying data source, the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) is used in a cohort study (1975-1995). We find that household production generates substantial values in low-income households while high-income households spent less time on household production tasks. The gender care gap is closing slightly, although women still are responsible for the majority of household value production.

Sustainability of Life: State of Art

Astrid Agenjo-Calderón
,
Pablo de Olavide University of Seville-Spain

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a literature review on the Sustainability of Life (SoL) approach. This has been developing specifically in the Spanish-speaking context of the last two decades, in the nexus between a decolonial feminist reading of the social and solidarity economy, altercapitalism and ecofeminism. With this, we seek to collaborate in the construction of the broad genealogy of Feminist Economics and highlighting the contributions of Latin American and Spanish thought. To this end, the work addresses four aspects: 1) this approach is placed in the broad spectrum of Feminist Economics (FE), referring to two levels: depending on the extent to which the FE detaches itself from the theoretical frameworks inherited, above all, from the neoclassical paradigm; and depending on the degree to which the political demands they make involve breaking or reformulating the current socio-economic system. SoL approach would thus be placed in a 'Rupturist Feminist Economics', since it introduces epistemological, methodological and political breaks of background that will be presented in this work. 2) It delves into the theoretical notions of Sustainability of Life and Capital-Life Conflict, which place at the center the materiality of life, oppression, and emancipation. 3) Addresses the decolonial contributions in terms of intersectionality and Eurocentric biases of many views of feminist economics; 4) finally, the Sustainability of Life as a political goal and the multiple ideas that must be articulated in a great utopian project are raised: to create liveable, prioritized and emancipated lives above capitalist accumulation.
JEL Classifications
  • B5 - Current Heterodox Approaches
  • J0 - General