affect, race, class

Affect, Race, and ClassAn Interpretive Reading of Caring Lahor

DRUCILLA K. BARKER AND SUSAN F. FEINER

Over the past two decades the relationships between women's roles in socialreproduction, women's subordinate position in paid labor markets, and themarginalization of caring labor in capitalist economies have emerged as cen-tral concerns in feminist economics. This attention is warranted becausethe transnational feminization of the labor force and the neoliberal policiesassociated with globalization impinge on the types of activities that havecome to be called caring labor. Women have increased their participation inthe paid-labor force but on a highly unequal footing. When relatively afflu-ent women enter the labor market, they are able to use some of their incometo purchase the domestic services no longer produced in the home, servicesprovided mainly by poor women from minority, working-class, or Third-World immigrant backgrounds. The pressures created by the neoliberal poli-cies accompanying globalization leave these women with few options otherthan to participate in the poorly paid, insecure, and devalorized segments ofthe transnational market for domestic labor, often forgoing the care of theirown children and families.

At least since the nineteenth century, caring for others has been associ-ated with feminine identity. Caring labor—attending to the physical andemotional needs of others—has been considered the quintessential form of"women's work." But just what sort of work it is has been a matter of debatesince at least the eighteenth century. This debate was part of the larger ques-tion concerning the appropriate way to specify the construction ofthe "econ-omy" by drawing a boundary between those human activities that were partof the economy and those that were not. As the heterodox economist DavidBrennan has argued, the classical political economists began by narrowingthe definition of what counted as economic activities to include only thoseactivities for which people were paid a wage or those that created goods orservices for exchange.' Activities undertaken for their own sake, such as gaz-

Barker and Feiner: Affect, Race, and Class 41

ing at a sunset or writing a poem (unless it was for sale) were not consideredeconomically productive; thus they were not considered work. To paraphraseAdam Smith, they make no contribution to the annual product of an econ-omy. The feminist economist Nancy Folbre has shown that by the middle ofthe nineteenth century this work/nonwork, productive/unproductive dichot-omy was firmly entrenched in both the United States and the British systemof national accounts.^ The myriad of economically necessary activities thattook place inside the household but outside monetary exchange were offi-cially expunged from the realm of the economic.

Boundaries are, however, permeable. The importance of non-market activ-ities—such as cooking, cleaning, shopping, and caring for dependents—tothe functioning of the economy was apparent to many concerned scholars.In the United States during the years between World War I and World WarII, institutionalist economists, mainly women in Midwest land-grant uni-versities, turned their attention to activities within the household and devel-oped the field of consumption economics.' During the 1960s Marxist femi-nist scholars in the United States and in Britain turned their attention towomen's work in the home, coining the term reproductive labor to describeit and analyze the ways in which it contributed to women's subordination.The legacy of the institutionalists' work is somewhat unfortunate; it wasabsorbed by home economics and lost its critical edge."* The Marxist feministwork followed a much different trajectory. The concept of reproductive laborengendered considerable debate and laid the foundation for what came to becalled caring labor. Caring labor, as stated above, is considered distinct fromother types of reproductive labor; whether paid or unpaid, the quality of carereceived depends in part on the quality of the relationships connecting thegivers and the receivers of care.

We will argue, however, that the ways in which the concept of caring laborhas been articulated blunts the critical edge of the concept of reproductivelabor for at least two reasons. First, the association between women andcare is a controlling image refiecting feminine/masculine, public/private,market/nonmarket, selfishness/altruism dualisms. Feminist discourses oncaring labor generally do not disrupt these dualisms but instead reinscribethe very antimonies they are challenging by masking the constitutive rolesplayed by race, class, and nation in their construction. Moreover, as pointedout by Bergeron (in this issue of Frontiers) these discourses reinscribe het-eronormative scripts that mask women's multiple and often contradictoryrelationships to social reproduction. Second, they implicitly cast the problemof care as a problem for individuals and families who enjoy the privileges ofcitizenship and are entitled to protection from the state. As the spectacles of

42 OFF THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW

Katrina, Darfur, Palestine, and Iraq have shown us, these lucky citizens arethe privileged few. As the social critic Henry A. Giroux has argued, entirepopulations marked by race and class are disenfranchised and disposable.^ Acritical discourse on care needs to open the door to an interrogation of justwho is entitled to be cared for and why. This paper employs an interpretiveapproach to explore the discursive construction of caring labor in feministeconomics. Finally, we suggest ways to employ it that do not reinscribe essen-tialist gender relations and other power relations of global capitalism.

AN INTERPRETIVE APPROACH

Following the work of V. Spike Peterson,* we use the term "interpretiveapproach" to allow for a variety of post-positivist, feminist commitments.^Interpretive approaches are particularly useful for feminist analysis becausethey provide a way to negotiate the tensions between the material and therepresentational, between power and knowledge, and between the subject asconstituted through discourse and the subject as capable of resistance andagency. There are basically two possible objections to this approach. First,it seems to undermine the scientific status of feminist economics; and sec-ond, considering women as a political/discursive category rather than anatural one seems to be antithetical to the aim of feminist economics tospeak on behalf of all women." It seems to undermine the goal to "hold eco-nomic thought to a standard that requires it to be more responsive to theneeds and well-being of women and their families."' In other words, one ofthe objectives of feminist economists is to use a gender-infiected economicsto improve the lives of all human beings, especially women. We argue thatan interpretive approach is not antithetical to this Enlightenment impulse,but, on tbe contrary, is necessary to its realization. It is necessary because itfacilitates a critical examination of the relationship between knowledge andpower. This is also, however, what makes it controversial for feminist econo-mists and other social scientists.

Exploring the knowledge/power nexus begins with the notion that thematerial and the representational are not radically separate. Meaning is con-stituted within discourses, so, as Foucault puts it, discourses are not justgroups of signs, but "practices that systematically form the objects of whichthey speak."'" The concept of discourses as practices implies that they refernot only to language, but also to social institutions and symbolic systems.Similarly, knowledge consists of that "which one can speak in a discursivepractice . . . it is also the space in which the subject may take up a positionand speak ofthe objects with which he deals in his discourse."" As Foucault's


subsequent genealogical work shows, the truth values of particular discur-sive formations are explained in terms of power. "Truth is a thing of thisworld . . . it induces regular effects of power."'̂ What he calls the politics oftruth determines what sorts of discourses are counted as true and who ispermitted to speak the truth.

Feminist economists are embedded in a network of power relations byvirtue of their connection to economics." Feminist economists enjoy theprestige of neoclassical economics while at the same time endeavor to bendits methodological commitments, especially statistical analysis and formalmodeling, to anti-sexist, anti-racist, and anti-nationalist ends. However, thequestion of whether feminist economics can use an interpretive approachand still be considered to be doing economic science depends on what thepurpose ofthat designation is." What are, as Foucault asks, "our aspirationsto the kind of power that is presumed to accompany . . . science."'̂

The answer for most feminist economists is to use economic knowledge toimprove the human condition. In this connection to mainstream econom-ics, however, lies the very real possibility that feminist economics will beappropriated by mainstream economic discourse. As Foucault has argued,unitary discourses are always willing to recolonize historically subjugatedknowledges. That is to say, dominant discourses may seek to bring counter-begemonic discourses back into the fold, with all that implies for knowledgeand power. For example, the rhetoric of gender equity and women's empow-erment, articulated by the gender and development theorists, has beenappropriated for the pro-growth polices of the World Bank in their report.Engendering Development: Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, andVoice}^ As Bergeron has argued, the Bank takes gendered social and cul-tural forces into account without sacrificing the core principles of econom-ics. An interpretive approach is necessary to uncover the dynamics of theseprocesses.'̂ As Nancy Naples has argued in the context of social movementframes, to understand the ways in which they are co-opted to serve goals thatare antithetical to feminism, it is necessary to understand the way that framesare "circulated, interpreted, and reinscribed with alternative meanings."'^

Finally, for the purposes of this analysis, an interpretive approach facili-tates a deconstruction of the equality/difference dilemma that haunts femi-nism. In the case of feminist economics, women are either rational economicagents (equality) or relational selves (difference). The rational economicagent, economic man, is radically separate, motivated only by self-interest,and free of natural obligations. He, and we use the pronoun deliberately, isthe disembodied liberal speaking subject of Enlightenment philosophy. Aninterpretive approach, which understands the subject as discursively consti-


tuted, enables feminists to interrogate the gendered character of economicman without simply reversing the dualism and positing a connected, car-ing, and relational self in its place. It leaves room for a notion ofthe subjectconstituted through contradictory discursive fields that create space for bothaccommodation and resistance. This is particularly important for the analy-sis of caring labor.

FROM SOCIAL REPRODUCTION TO CARING LABOR

Debates around social reproduction and caring labor in feminist economicsare best understood in terms of the two intellectual traditions in the field,one informed by Marxist/socialist feminism and the other by liberal femi-nism." Early feminist work in economics following the liberal feminist tradi-tion assumed that women's equality with men would come about as a resultof their participation in paid labor on equal footing witb men. Women's sub-ordinate position in paid labor markets was attributed to tbeir responsibilityfor the lioness's share of household production.^" Early feminist work in theMarxist/socialist political economy tradition understood gender oppressionas resulting from sexual division of labor, which under capitalism meant thedivision between paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive, and domes-tic and waged labor. Women's emancipation in this tradition required thatmen engage in reproductive labor in the same way that women do. We willrefer to these two broad traditions as Marxist/socialist feminist economics andliberal feminist ecotiomics.^^ Both link "women's work" and women's subordi-nation, but the differences between household production and reproductivelabor are more than semantic.

Liberal feminist economists do not treat household production as analyti-cally separate from productive labor. That is, although analyzing the econom-ics of household production requires explicitly accounting for the nonmar-ket value of time expended on household activities, these activities are formsof work like any other. The question is, how do women's household responsi-bilities influence their experiences in paid labor markets? To the extent thatthe influence is negative, housework and childcare stand in the way of gen-der equity. Barbara Bergmann, a contemporary feminist economist in theliberal tradition argues that women's household labor traditionally assignedto women be commodified and either purchased from business enterprisesor provided by the state." Bergmann's position is aptly summarized in thetitle of her 1998 article, "The Only Ticket to Equality: Total Androgyny, MaleStyle." More recently, the philosopher Linda R. Hirshman echoed similarsentiments when she criticized the choice of elite women who drop out ofthe


labor force to raise their families." She argued that although the repetitious,socially invisible, physical tasks of family life are necessary, they allow feweropportunities for human flourishing than the public spheres of the market orthe government. Opting out of the labor force is wrong, because in additionto denying society access to their talents and intelligence, these women cutoff their own human development. For liberal feminists such as Bergmannand Hirshman, extolling caring labor or any form of household productionwill only reinforce women's subordinate status.

In the Marxist/socialist tradition in feminist economics, reproductivelabor is analytically distinct from productive labor." From its inception, thisnew category presented considerable difficulties. Susan Himmelweit arguedthat forcing domestic labor into the category "work," which is derived fromthe Marxist notion of wage labor producing commodities for capital, ren-ders invisible caring and other self-fulfilling activities.̂ ^ Work is a purpose-ful activity that takes time and energy, forms part of a division of labor, andis separable from the person doing it. This concept of work is an abstrac-tion not applicable even to all paid work, and its fit is even more problematicwhen extended outside that domain.

Himmelweit argues that activities such as childcare do not fit into thecategory work because the notion that work is separable from the persondoing it is violated. Although it may seem appropriate to commodify manythings formerly produced in the household, other things such as childcare,elder-care, and caring for the emotional needs of family, friends, and col-leagues are qualitatively different. Caring labor should be considered analyt-ically distinct from other sorts of reproductive labor. The distinction is thatwhether paid or unpaid, the quality of care received depends, in part, on thequality of the relationships connecting the givers and the receivers of care.̂ '̂Himmelweit's concern over treating caring labor as work is that it devaluesthe relational and self-fulfilling aspects of those activities. Moreover, peoplewho perform caring activities are not considered real workers and the workremains largely invisible. Her conclusion is that caring and self-fulfillingactivities will challenge the work/consumption dichotomy only if they areshared equally within households.

Concern over the commodification of caring labor is likewise found in thework of Nancy Folbre and Julie A. Nelson. Folbre's classic article argues thatcaring labor presents a paradox for feminist economists because the affectivenature of care implies that it should be its own reward; however, if it does notcommand an economic return its global supply will be diminished." Later,an article by Folbre and Nelson begins with the concern that many of thecaring activities and tasks formerly performed by family or friends are now

4 6 OFF THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW

being performed within relationships based purely on monetary exchange.^'Drawing a contrast between caring for and caring about, they argue that oneofthe distinctive things about care work is that it is undertaken for both loveand money. Their concern is the effects of commodification on the qualityof care.

AFFECT, REPRESENTATION, AND VALUE IN CARING LABOR

We share the concern of all three of these authors over the global supply ofcaring labor and agree that its affective component makes it theoretically dis-tinct. However, theorizing the affective component as "caring about" leavesin place its gendered dualisms and invites no consideration of the ways inwhich the social value of caring labor is constituted by the social locations ofthe givers and receivers of care. Moreover, by restricting the concept of caremetaphorically to the domestic sphere, it provides no space to interrogatewhy some populations are entitled to be cared for and cared about, whileothers are not afforded this privilege.

We begin with the poststructuralist rereading of caring labor by femi-nist economist Gillian Hewitson.^' She argues that if one begins with theassumption that biological difference between the sexes is the basis for thesocial differentiation between masculine and feminine genders, then generalgender socialization allocates feminine traits to biological females and maletraits to biological males. In this scenario, caring is a female trait becausenormal feminine identity is one believed to be naturally endowed with boththe capacity and the desire to care for others. Normal masculine identity, onthe other hand, is understood to be lacking these capacities. Feminists arethen faced with the question of whether women should be socialized likemen or whether women are in fact naturally different from men. In otherwords, the equality/difference dichotomy is left intact.

If, as in the liberal tradition, gender equality requires that women becomemore like men, then women must fit into a set of structures and meaningsthat are organized around male bodies. If, as in the socialist tradition, valo-rizing care requires a reorganization ofthe gender division of labor, then theproblem is with the assumption that the sexual division of labor creates gen-der difference.'" In both cases it is the notion that sexual difference precedesgender difference that creates the impasse. If, however, we adopt a poststruc-turalist approach in which the real is constituted as meaningful through rep-resentations, then we open a space for theorizing sexual difference and sexedbodies. This space allows us to deconstruct the link between women and careand to theorize other embodied differences. '̂


Hewitson argues that sex/gender behaviors and practices are understoodvery differently when they are displayed by women rather than men." Weargue that they are also understood differently according to differencesin race, class, sexuality, and nation. In the United States, tax policies, wel-fare policies, and popular opinion extol the decisions of affluent women ofEuropean descent to drop out of the labor force to care for their children.Poor black women, who must depend on the state as well as on their part-ners, are considered lazy and shiftless for the same decision. Poor black,Latina, and Filipina women who provide child care for the children of theaffluent are considered "workers," even though they are poorly paid relativeto what might be earned by a young woman of European descent. The differ-ence lies in the political and cultural representations of those doing the carework and those being cared for.̂ ^

Not only do race, class, and nation mutually constitute the value of car-ing labor; but the category itself, with it emphasis on the affective, nurturingqualities of care, reinscribes hierarchies of race, class, and nation. SociologistsMignon Duffy, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, and Dorothy Roberts have exploredthe ways in which the affective component of caring labor is racialized.'"*Nakano Glenn argues that white women have been the public face of repro-ductive labor, and Roberts argues that the spiritual dimensions of domes-tic labor have been the province of white women. Both call attention to thefact that women of color are disproportionately represented in "back room"menial and manual tasks. Duffy's empirical analysis supports the hypoth-esis that the theoretical emphasis on nurturance privileges the experiencesof white women and excludes the experiences of poor women and women ofcolor.

Understanding the ways in which the affective (nurturing) quality ofreproductive labor came to be racialized and separated from tbe produc-tive aspect needs to begin with the productive/unproductive distinction andthe development of the cult of true womanhood in the nineteenth century.During this time, concerns over capitalist relations of production were notso much concerned with those activities that we now call caring labor; butrather with the emergence of waged employment and changing class struc-tures. The notion that women were unsuited for the world of work was inpart a reaction to the anxieties engendered by capitalist social relations andinfused with notions of race/class hierarchies. The woman who was the"angel in the house" was never every woman, but specifically an upper-mid-dle-class ethnically European woman of means. African American women,lower-class British women, and indigenous Asian women were implicitly ifnot explicitly excluded. Although the nurturing qualities of such women


were drawn upon, these qualities were considered natural and thus not need-ing compensation. More importantly, these qualities were considered infe-rior because they were not inñected by the standards of piety, purity, submis-siveness, and domesticity that were the special province of elite Europeanwomen. Today, the special province of elite women of European heritage isnot spelled out in such quaint terms, but instead this is understood in termsof education, technological prowess, and cultural sophistication.

The value of caring labor likewise depends on whether it is paid or unpaid.The notion that paid care is inferior to unpaid care and that paying for caredegrades its value is pervasive in the literature on this subject. ConsiderFolbre's assertion that the term caring labor denotes a caring motive: "laborundertaken out of affection or a sense of responsibility for other people, withno expectation of immediate pecuniary reward."" This motive, according toFolbre, is "particularly crucial to meeting the needs of children, the elderly,and the sick." Likewise, the joint article by Julie Nelson and Nancy Folbrebegins witb the assumption that there is clear separation between tbe worldof money and profit and the world of care concern and pose their researchquestion in terms of the consequences of mixing the realms of "love andmoney."'* These are only two of many examples.

The worries over mixing the realms of love and money are manifestationsof larger anxieties over commodifying human relationships. Like love, careis most genuine when freely given. Like sex, monetized transactions seem todegrade it. It may suffice; but, it is not the genuine article. This refiects theprivate/public split in which money, commerce, and contract are part of thepublic realm of business and government, while love, altruism, and obliga-tion are part of the private realm of the family. As the anthropologist HollyWardlow has argued in a discussion of sex work, "Women are the keepers ofthe affective economy, safeguarding emotional labor from its possible alien-ation in the capitalist economy."" Thus like sex work, care work that is under-taken for money rather than for love violates "this gendered imperative."

The problem, as Nakano Glenn bas argued, is that "those relegated to theprivate sphere and associated with its values . . . have long been excludedfrom full citizenship."'* As she and other researchers have argued, the idealcitizen, like the rational economic agent, is independent, autonomous, andradically separate. This fiction obscures the needs for connection and carethat even "independent" people have. Despite the ideology that care is theprovince of the family, paid care work has become more and more commonand it is done by people who have little status in society because of tbeir race,class, or immigrant status. The stigmatized social status of paid care work-ers affects the perception of the work they do; the fact that the service is


being provided for money demeans the affective aspect of the work, whichreinforces the low status and meager wages of those who do it. So stressingthe affective nature ofthe work, without interrogating its racialized and gen-dered history, reinforces this dialectic. Perhaps more importantly, it does notinterrogate the role that affect plays in reproducing the unequal relationsbetween employers and employees.

Christina Hughes has examined the discourse of care as a counter dis-course to the hegemonic discourse of capitalist individualism.^' The inter-esting question is how the dissonance produced by these two contradictorydiscursive fields affects women. She argues that dissonance is internalizedand "reinforced through everyday acts that teach women their inferiority.""*"So like other counter discourses, the discourse of care can be appropriatedin ways that reinscribe the hegemony ofthe dominant discourse. An ethno-graphic study of working-class women in Britain reveals this process."" Forthese women, enrolled in college courses in health and social work, becom-ing a caring person was a way to become a respectable and respected per-son. It was a way to escape the stigma of the working class as pathological,dangerous, and threatening. The structure of the coursework and examina-tions reinforced the conflation of caring for and caring about; in doing sothey reinforced the gendered stereotypes ofthe good woman, the respectablewoman: a woman who obeys the rules rather than questions them, a womanwho puts the interests of others before her own.

CONCLUSION

The notion that paid caregivers ought to be motivated by concern for oth-ers as well as for money works against effective strategies to gain higherwages, better working conditions, and so forth. This combined with thenotion that caring is the special province of women, especially mothers,impedes socially progressive solutions to the crisis of care."^ The questionremains, how can an ethic of care be a discourse of resistance rather thanone of subjection? To that end, we suggest replacing the mother/child dyadas the paradigm of care and instead linking care discourses to collectivistsocial movements such as activist mothering, the caring activities exhibitedby queer communities during the AIDs crisis, the collective nurseries runby the Black Panthers, and other communal style arrangements. This politi-cal move would likewise call attention to the importance of collective socialresponsibility for the care of populations marginalized by poverty, race, eth-nicity, and nationality.


NOTES

1. David M. Brennan, "Defending the Indefensible? Culture's Role in the Produc-

tive/Unproductive Dichotomy," Feminist Economics 12, no. 3 (2006): 403-25.

2. Nancy Folbre, "Exploitation Comes Home: A Critique of the Marxian Theory

of Family Labour," Cambridge Journal of Economics 6, no. 4 (1982): 317-29.

3. See for example Hazel Kyrk, A Theory of Consumption (Boston: Houghton Mif-

flin, 1923); Margret Gilpin Reid, Economics of Household Production (New York: John

Wiley, 1934); and Elizabeth Ellis Hoyt, The Consumption of Wealth (New York: Mac-

millan, 1928).

4. Shoshana Grossbard has argued persuasively that this work provided the foun-

dation for the "new home economics" developed by Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker.

See Shoshana Grossbard, Jacob Mincer, A Pioneer of Modern Labor Economics (New

York: Springer, 2006).

5. Henry A. Giroux, "Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics

of Disposability," College Literature ;i^, no. 3 (2006): 171-196.

6. V. Spike Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating

Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (London: Routledge, 2003).

7. The term interpretive analytics was coined by Rabinow and Dreyfus to charac-

terize Foucault's method. Foucault was attempting to find a position between the

structuralist model of human behavior as rule-governed systems in which subjects

are produced through discourse and the transcendental subject of the hermeneuti-

cal method. See Hubert Dreyfus, Hubert and Paul Rabinow, Michel Eoucault, Beyond

Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1983). Our use of the term interpretive approach is less precise and reflects a variety of

commitments to the politics of knowledge.

8. Drucilla Barker, "Beyond Women and Economics: Rereading Women's Work,"

Signs; Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, no. 4 (2005): 2189-2209.

9. Diana Strassmann, "Feminist Economics," in The Elgar Companion to Eemi-

nist Economics, ed. Janice Peterson and Margaret Lewis (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar,

1999). 360.

10. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Lan-

guage, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smithy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 49.

11. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, 182.

12. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews

and Other Writings i^j2-i97j by Michel Eoucault, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gor-

don, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Solper (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 131.

13. Drucilla Barker, "A Seat at the Table: Feminist Economists Negotiate Develop-

ment," in Feminist Economics and the World Bank: History, Theory, and Policy, ed.

Edith Kuiper and Drucilla Barker (London: Routledge, 2006).14. One can also ask whether the accepted methods of social science, particu-


larly its reliance on statistical evidence, are incommensurate with an interpretive

approach. At the very least, the truth status of statistical evidence would need to be

reconsidered. But this is a question for another day.

15. Foucault, "Truth and Power," 84. Foucault is referring to the aspirations of

Marxism and psychoanalysis in this lecture. We think the argument is equally appli-

cable to feminist economics.

16. World Bank, Engendering Development: Through Gender Equality in Rights,

Resources, and Voice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

17. Suzanne Bergeron, "Colonizing Knowledge: Economics and Interdiscipli-

narity in Engendering Development," in Feminist Economics and the World Bank:

History, Theory, and Policy, ed. Edith Kuiper and Drucilla Barker (London: Rout-

ledge, 2006).

18. Nancy A. Naples, Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and

Activist Research (New York: Routledge, 2003), 91.

19. Barker, "A Seat at the Table."

20. Mainstream economists were also concerned about the differences in labor-

market outcomes between women and men in terms of the gendered and unequal

distribution of household responsibilities. Their explanations centered on the

notions of choice and marginal productivity. Women's subordinate position in labor

markets was explained by their differences in education and training, and these dif-

ferences in turn were explained in terms of rational choice. Women choose occu-

pations that required relatively less training and that were compatible with their

household responsibilities.

21. See Barker, "A Seat at the Table," for a fuller exposition of this point.

22. Barbara Bergmann, The Economic Emergence of Women (New York: Basic

Books, 1986) and Barbara Bergmann, "The Only Ticket to Equality: Total Androg-

yny, Male Style," Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues 9 (Spring 1998): 75-86. The

problems associated with low pay and exploitation would be mitigated as women

and men became more equal, or should be addressed by labor market regulations

and unionization.

23. Linda R. Hirshman, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women ofthe World (New

York: Viking, 2006).

24. See Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of Com-

munity (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1972); Susan Himmelweit, "Domestic Labor," in

The Elgar Companion to Feminist Economics, ed. Janice Peterson and Margaret Lewis

(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1999), 126-35; and Maxine Molyneux, "Beyond the

Domestic Labor Debate," New Left Review 116 (July-August 1979): 3-27.

25. Susan Himmelweit, "The Discovery of'Unpaid Work,'" Feminist Economics 1,

no. 2 (1995): 1-20.

26. For an overview of this literature see, Nancy Folbre, "Holding Hands at Mid-


night: The Paradox of Caring Labor," Feminist Economics l, no. l (1995): 73-92; Paula

England and Nancy Folbre, "The Cost of Caring," The Annals of the American Acad-

emy of Political and Social Science 561, no. 1 (1999): 39-51; Mary Daly, ed., Gare Work:

The Quest for Security (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2001); Susan Himmel-

weit, "An Evolutionary Approach to Eeminist Economics: Two Different Models of

Caring," in Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics, ed. Drucilla Barker and Edith

Kuiper (London: Routledge, 2003), 247-65; Maren A. Jochimsen, "Integrating Vul-

nerability: On the Impact of Caring on Economic Theorizing," in Toward a Eeminist

Philosophy of Economics, ed. Drucilla Barker and Edith Kuiper (London: Routledge,

2003), 231-46; and Guy Standing, "Care Work: Overcoming Insecurity and Neglect,"

in Gare Work: The Quest for Security, ed. Mary Daly (London: International Labour

Office, 2001), 15-32.

27. Eolbre, "Holding Hands at Midnight," 73-92.

28. Nancy Eolbre and lulie A. Nelson, "Eor Love or Money—or Both?" The Jour-

nal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (2000): 123-140.

29. Gillian!. Hewkson, Feminist Economics: Interrogating the Masculinity of Ratio-

nal Economic Man (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1999) and Gillian I. Hewitson,

"Domestic Labor and Gender Identity: Are All Women Carers?" in Toward a Femi-

nist Philosophy of Economics, ed. Drucilla Barker and Edith Kuiper (London: Rout-

ledge, 2003), 266-84.

30. Eor further discussion on the Marxist relationship between the sexual divi-

sion of labor and gender difference, see Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei, Race, Gen-

der, and Work: A Multicultural History of the United States (rev. ed., Boston: South

End Press, 1996).

31. Hewitson, "Domestic Labor and Gender Identity," 266-84.

32. Ibid.

33. Barker, "Beyond Women and Economics," 2189-2209.

34. See Mignon Duffy, "Reproducing Labor Inequalities," Gender & Society 19, no.

1 (2005): 66-82; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "Erom Servitude to Service Work: Histori-

cal Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor," Signs; Journal of

Women, Gulture and Society 18, no. 1 (1992): 1-43; and Dorothy E. Roberts, "Spiritual

and Menial Housework," Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 9, no. 1 (1997): 51-80.

35. Eolbre, "Holding Hands at Midnight," 73-92.

36. Eolbre and Nelson, "Eor Love or Money—or Both?" 123-140.

37. Holly Wardlow, "Anger, Economy, And Female Agency: Problematizing 'Pros-

titution' and 'Sex Work' Among The Huli Of Papua New Guinea," Signs: Journal of

Women in Gulture and Society 29, no. 4 (2004): 1030.

38. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, "Creating a Caring Society," Gontemporary Sociology

29, no. 1 (2000): 85.

39. Christina Hughes, Women's Gontemporary Lives: Within and Beyond the Mir-

ror (London: Routledge, 2002).


40. Ibid.41. Beverly Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender (London: Sage, 1997).42. Rhacel Salazar Parrefias has shown such impedance to progress in the context

of Filipina women migrants and their children who remain in the Philippines. Thepublic rhetoric around the problems that the children face because their mothers areabsent impedes an effective solution to the care crisis there. See Rhacel Salazar Par-reñas, "The Care Crisis in the Philippines: Children and Transnational Families inthe New Global Economy," in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers inthe New Economy, ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (New York:Henry Holt and Company, 2002), 39-54.


affect, race, class

Documents

Transcript of affect, race, class