FEMINIST THE POLITICS OF CARE AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

   FEMINIST THE POLITICS OF CARE AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

Late 2007, when prominent economists around the world set out to survey the field of feminist political economy, U.S as well as the entire Europe countries were being traumatized by the economic recession. China and India on the other hand seemed to be gaining reputation within the global financial policies, and across the world, those who were advocating for free-market reforms and deregulation of capital were losing support. However, some six years down the line, with banking gratuities skyrocketing as well as savage asceticism policies being put in place across the Europe countries, “the crisis” appeared to be more of a chance to deepen both neoliberalism and political relations than rapture. At this time, the debate on feminist political economy became very important, and gendered questions a key to every international political economy.

The trend has kept its phase up to today. For instance, inadequate weight has been extended to what is obvious a myth: that Black women and Latins in America were overrepresented as objectives of subprime loaning and that consumption pattern fluctuations are likely to be financed by women who work within and outside their home countries (Cameron & Gibson, 2013, p.145). Ethnographic testimonies of the trade bases have fully depicted gender bias for a long time, and researchers have revealed the hegemonic racialized virilities which are in ordinary world capitalism domain: yet attention in masculinity racialization has been undermined in international political economy.

The second factor that has motivated consideration on what value feminist approaches could add to the current debates engulfing the global political economy was remarked by the capitalist crisis (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2012, p.87). Deep and shocking as it was, the fact is, it was neither the first one nor the last. Both men and women have endured crises in on daily skirmishes, and feminists have examined and canvassed on economic crisis, for a long time: the gendered crisis witnessed in late 1980s, the Argentine crisis, and the East Asia crises among others. This history must not be ignored as we face the current crisis. Consumption patterns adopted in the North has greatly transformed some economies of developing countries, where new global labour divisions has taken place alongside the increasing conscription of female employees under consolidation of gendered labor division approach (Bakker, 2017, p.541). Care chains have also advanced as most of migrant laborers offer both market and domestic-based care work crucial to sustain the economies in North. Concurrently, these exchange modes have deepened class divisions and established new cities in Southern regions that are passage magnets of remarkable proportions. Considering such important historical links provides alternative perspectives from which we can weigh the current crises, approaching the systems of consumption, social reproduction, production and exchange, all in a distinct feminist light (Noddings, 2016, p.45).

Feminist approaches in global political economy extremely vary, with three crucial themes identical. First, looking into gendered systems of entrepreneurial manufacture and consumption, which sheds light on the fluctuating relations amongst states and the global economy at large; investment and capital accumulation globally; the social reproduction nature; the correlation between discursive and material production, as well as the circulation of products, services and technical knowledge; the gendered consumption patterns; and the changing relationships between states, local communities and the globalized markets (Fook, 2016). 

Gendered exchange system is the second theme, which has made gendered labor division analysis easier; nature of exchanges, whether on cash or care bases within the private and public sectors of an economy; the impacts of transactions in fashioning and changing gendered affairs. Lastly, is the theme which has taken up gendered fights for freedom and equality, and which has led to evaluation of difficulties to capitalism after the Cold War; analyzing race, class and gender relationships underlying certain approaches to empowerment and theoretical critiques concerning transformation, emancipation and equality; as well as gender issues in current IPE critiques (Silvey, 2014).

While themes such as production and consumption, resistance as well as exchange have underpinned feminist political economy, there are three areas which can be analyzed to bring about alternative feminist perspectives. These areas concern, social reproduction, governance and sexuality. And paying the necessary attention to them would underline continuities while drawing departure lines from prior debates. This will also suggest how feminist responses can help in solving the current capitalism crisis.

Gender and Governance

With the current changes regulating the capitalist matters and formulation of social policies, feminist approach has concentrated on establishing relationships between civil societies, nongovernmental organizations, states and markets. While earlier interventions basically considered gender sensitization outside the global institutions, there were also strong bodies of literature focusing on femininity mainstreaming mainly to uncover processes through which social policies were enclosed and altered within the institutions (Bender, 2011, p.3).

Governance analysis based on its state-centric nature has also been confronted. And although Shirin and Georgina maintains that global governance focus needs to be based on individual the analysis since people “need to historicize the contemporary situation as the state has been reconfigured under globalization/neo liberalism”, based on local political perspective state-centric analyses has been challenged by several other scholars. Critically, some have scrutinized how parallel authorities function within a state as parallel, legal and carceral systems and how both polities as well as community governance are jointly imbricated to come up with structures of oppression and power via spectacular exercises of retribution and exile which deepen both financial and social crisis. The focus and conclusions of these approaches tend to differ but all acknowledging the complex nature of structures of governance. In consideration to this, current feminist approaches are exploring the multilayered regime governance which involves states, religious actors as well as the local communities. Feminists’ approaches have therefore without reasonable doubt established political-economic changes in the current order of governance which has grappled with definitional constraints of governance as well as alternative ways of governing (Mountz et al., 2015, p.1235).

Social Reproduction and Work

The discussion outlined above on governance rotates around the key feminist approaches regarding both public and private sector, which sheds light on omission of social reproduction aspect from other categories of work. Regardless of some differences when emphasizing on feminism, social reproduction comprises of three important components. The first one is the production of prospect labor, and the provision of affective services (like the ones required to sustain families and cherished relationships); the second one covers the voluntary production of goods and services taking place at home, mostly of care and social provision (the voluntary work to meet the needs of the society); and lastly, the reproduction of beliefs and ideologies which alleviates dominant social affairs. These components have been institutionalized via everyday life organization and gendered labor. While family is termed as the primary institution involved in social reproduction, feminists have come up with the “care diamond” concept to examine variations in provision of these services between the state, community, and market (Code, 2016).

Despite of its regular significance to our lives, social reproduction is rarely incorporated in analytical work done by political market analysts, nor is it usually represented in national insights (Laslett & Brenner, 2015, p.381). Nonetheless, the significance of what sometimes is termed as the “glorious tangle of production and reproduction” and that describes individuals’ lives as perceived by feminists. Specifically, after investigating the 1980s-style neoliberalism which pushed ladies into the paid work force while expanding their duties; there has been, notwithstanding, a less brought together reaction from feminists to ensue capitalism. As states and worldwide monetary organizations incidentally got some distance from the savage assortments of neoliberalism forced through contingencies and towards a post Washington Consensus about institutional fortifying, great administration, consideration of the underestimated, and social wellbeing nets, feminists reacted disparately (O’neill, 2013).

While some respected the move, working inside the advancement mechanical assembly because gender is being considered much more important now, others contended that the counter poverty ventures related with this new period of strategy have additionally expanded social propagation loads on ladies by standardizing their parts – manufactured under emergency conditions – in securing group and family survival. This brings up significant issues about the degree to which the new destitution programs that portray “comprehensive neoliberalism” are dependent on “female unselfishness at the administration of the state” and how these may develop in an emergency setting. Issues of work ; paid and unpaid, formal and casual ; stay key to feminist IPE faces off regarding and the guarantee of paid work and market incorporation as courses to ladies’ strengthening keeps on being fundamentally grilled (Watson et al., 2014, p.331).

Intimacy and the Household

The revival of policies focusing on family interests has been, to some extent, a response to both privatization and individualization issues of care, with a keep observation to parenting matters in many states, an economic relook of childcare based on the concept of the investable child, and retributive, even criminal procedures to enforce responsibility parents. Internationally, United Nations’ Commission focused on equal responsibility sharing between men and women, specifically in the perspective of caregiving guidance on HIV/AIDS, a further contribution by feminists to ensuring resurgence as a form of securing care. Contrary to this, the need to disparagingly interrogate the connection between political frugality and models of affinity from a strange antiracist point of view was marked nearly twenty years ago, identifying the heteronormative form of feminist political economy as barrier to complete gender balance and structural adjustment (England & Lawson, 2015, p.77).

Other research studies have argued in the perspective of “queering the care imaginary,” or isolating the heteronormative paradigm when it comes to care provision. For instance, Roseneil bases his concern on the role of companionship to feminists who have expressed interest in care; others scholars have scrutinized how the bond between community members by desire can lead to  mutual care between one another, through which sex can be understood as a form of care, and how community cohesions and kinship attachments might be revisited outside a racialized family model, and how restructuring of families are taking place from mere normative ideals which seeks to increase labor force participation on the sector of female gender. These kind of debates based on the effective feminist care provision models have always been uptight, but with the current increasing interests being narrowed into family care by both national and transnational policy making agencies basically to address the social reproduction dilemma, they are pertinent now than ever.

The difficulties postured from eccentric points of view to the heteronormative surrounding of the economy and the strategy scene stretches out past a need to sexualize social multiplication wrangles about, in any case. A developing assemblage of feminist approaches on sexuality and IPE has laid out and broke down the interweaving of business sectors and sexualities and the unpredictable associations between changing details of private enterprise and closeness. Numerous nations have seen the extended marketization of gender conceivable outcomes, for instance through business settings for sexual minority groups, or recently real open doors for obtaining a few sorts of sex, while in different cases state and superstate observation of gender markets has increased (Watson et al., 2014, p.331). As clarified in late work on the commodification of new regenerative and undifferentiated cell advances and the colossal benefits being produced using global sex enterprises, the exemplary open deliberations over the part of heteronormativity in capitalism are a long way from settled.

We direly require “considering the conceivable outcomes that contemporary definition of worldwide private enterprise open up for elective sexual and sex legislative issues and in addition to the new sexual standards and controls being made in the neoliberal world request”. In comparable light, as certain regularizing eccentric populaces may be, to utilize Jasbir K. Puar’s encircling, “collapsed into life” through state acknowledgment of marriage rights, child rearing rights, etc., and other contrastingly racialized, gendered, and sexualized populaces are focused for death, or are rendered expendable (Watson et al., 2014, p.331). The mind boggling connections and cracks between these locales and procedures are just starting to be coaxed out, and there is much to be found out about assembling a basic hostile to radical feminist reactions – one that denies the market-praising libertarianism of the (nonreligious) Right, the erotophobia of some left developments, the mobilized philanthropy of some transnational gender orientation activism, and the continuing heteronormativity of some feminist political economy.

Conclusion

Feminist approaches enable us to understand the relationships between macro and micro inclinations, utilitarian forms, and areas of struggle. These concepts have always been fruitful to because they enhance understanding as to why neoliberal era has stood the test of time rather than fading way especially in this context of economic crisis. Particularly, we realize that feminist research studies usually entail grounded facts that oppose the purported contradiction of empirical vs theoretical work, and which sometimes is presented, more maliciously, as a difference between hypothetical work with a purportedly universal approach, vs empirical study with only local inferences. Feminist IPE has been described by critical, tentatively rich, and logically radical grounded studies and theorization, and this becomes the key source depicting its importance in analytical insights.

References

Cameron, J. and Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2013. Feminising the economy: metaphors, strategies,        politics. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 10(2), pp.145-           157.

Kincheloe, J.L. and McLaren, P., 2012. Rethinking critical theory and qualitative   research. Ethnography and schools: Qualitative approaches to the study of education,     pp.87-138.

Bakker, I., 2017. Social reproduction and the constitution of a gendered political economy. New Political Economy, 12(4), pp.541-556.

Noddings, N., 2016. Critical lessons: What our schools should teach. Cambridge University          Press.

Fook, J., 2016. Social work: A critical approach to practice. Sage.

Silvey, R., 2014. Power, difference and mobility: feminist advances in migration   studies. Progress in human geography, 28(4), pp.490-506.

Bender, L., 2011. A lawyer’s primer on feminist theory and tort. Journal of Legal Education, 38(1/2), pp.3-37.

Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., Basu, R.,       Whitson, R., Hawkins, R., Hamilton, T. and Curran, W., 2015. For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal        university. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(4), pp.1235-          1259.

Code, L., 2016. Ecological thinking: The politics of epistemic location. Oxford University Press.

Laslett, B. and Brenner, J., 2015. Gender and social reproduction: Historical          perspectives. Annual review of sociology, 15(1), pp.381-404.

O’neill, M., 2013. Prostitution and feminism: Towards a politics of feeling. John Wiley & Sons.

Watson, N., McKie, L., Hughes, B., Hopkins, D. and Gregory, S., 2014. (Inter) dependence,        needs and care: The potential for disability and feminist theorists to develop an       emancipatory model. Sociology, 38(2), pp.331-350.

England, K. and Lawson, V., 2015. Feminist analyses of work: Rethinking the boundaries,            gendering, and spatiality of work(pp. 77-92). Blackwell Publishing Ltd.