Social reproduction and the constitution of a gendered political economy

New Political Economy

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 541-556

  Bakker, Isabella ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

FEMINISM; GENDER ROLE; POLITICAL ECONOMY;

EID: 37749041084     PISSN: 13563467     EISSN: 14699923     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13563460701661561     Document Type: Review

References (59)

1. Grappling with definitions of social reproduction also characterise early interventions in the debate. Edholm, Harris and Young provide us with a key entry point into specifying reproduction as a historically and culturally specific term. They isolate three different 'reproductions' which correspond to different levels of theoretical abstraction ranging from the macro to the micro: Social reproduction of social systems in their totality through time; reproduction of the labour force; and human or biological reproduction. They link this defi-nition to the basic structures that have to be reproduced in order that social reproduction as a whole can take place. Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris & Kate Young, 'Conceptualising Women', Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 9/10, No. 3 (1977), pp. 101-30.
2. Isabella Bakker & Stephen Gill (eds), Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in the Global Political Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 32.
3. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. I (University of California Press, 1992), p. 29.
4. Fernand Braudel, On History (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 31.
5. Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation and Capitalism (John Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 29-31.
6. Braudel, Civilisation and Capitalism, pp. 620 and 65.
7. Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilisation and Capitalism, p. 8.
8. Ibid., p. 7.
9. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (Allen Lane, 1971) and The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production (Allison & Busby, 1976).
10. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia Pluto, 2003), p. 12.
11. She is explicitly engaged in a dialogue with Foucault's concept of bio-power that she argues does indeed register the shift from a type of power built on the right to kill to one exercised through the administration and promotion of life-forces. However, she notes that the latter relates to the rise of capitalism and the contradictory forces of accumulation and reproduction of labour power. She is also critical of Foucault's collapsing of female and male histories into an undifferentiated whole, significantly by not mentioning the most signifi-cant disciplining of women: The witch-hunt (p. 8). See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage, 1977).
12. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, p. 184.
13. Mariarosa Dalla Costa & Selma James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Falling Wall Press, 1975).
14. Margaret Benston, The Political Economy of Women's Liberation (New England Free Press, 1969).
15. Heidi Hartman, 'The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class and Political Struggle', Signs, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1981) pp. 366-94.
16. Antonella Picchio, Social Reproduction: The Political Economy of the Labour Market (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
17. Maria Mies, Patriachy and Capital Accumulation (Zed Books, 1986), also explores the relationship between primitive accumulation and the witch hunts. She notes that these witch hunts were an especially lucrative source of money and wealth for those engaged in the process, from those who confiscated witches' property to those who actually carried out the witch burning. In addition to Mies' book, this theme is visited in Maria Mies, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen & Claudia von Werlhof, Women: The Last Colony (Zed Books, 1988), where they develop the theme of the historical and continual colonisation of women - housewifisation, primitive accumulation.
18. The brackets indicate that, in some contexts, these activities have never been private but kinship-based or community-based. This reflects Polanyi's observation that many forms of social reproduction rest on relations of reciprocity and redistribution - hence, economic activities were embedded in a wider network of social relations. See The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 1944). Another current aspect relates to the situation of many developing economies where the state has never been a strong force in social reproduction (that is, risk was not collectivised). Hence one cannot speak of a withdrawal. One can, however, discern the increased infiltration of the market into daily activities as a mediator of life chances.
19. Philip McMichael, 'Feeding the World: Agriculture, Development and Ecology', in Leo Panitch & Colin Leys (eds), The Socialist Register 2007 (The Merlin Press, 2007), pp. 170-94.
20. Bakker & Gill, Power, Production and Social Reproduction, pp. 18-9.
21. Gill & Bakker, 'New Constitutionalism and the Social Reproduction of Caring Institutions', Journal of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics Vol. 27, No. 1 (2006), pp. 35-57.
22. Mariama Williams, Gender Issues in the Multilateral Trading System: A Manual (Commonwealth Secretariat, 2003).
23. For instance, Diane Elson's account of the three sectors of the political economy - the domestic, the private, and the public - notes that domestic structures are as taken for granted in the new political economy as they were in the nineteenth century. This not only has economic implications (largely related to omitting the unpaid work of women) but also includes the 'undermining of the conditions of supply for a productive and willing labour force'. Diane Elson, 'The Economic, the Political and the Domestic: Businesses, States and Households in the Organisation of Production', New Political Economy, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1998), pp. 189-208. In particular, 'the process of globalisation has exacerbated the mismatch between the activities of the domestic, public and private sectors' (pp. 203-4) through restrictive fiscal and monetary policies which externalise the costs of social reproduction, offloading these to the domestic sector. Indeed, the increased mobility of capital and the reality of tax competition have shifted the burden of social spending away from firms and high income individuals toward labour and the poor, ultimately leading to a 'fiscal squeeze' for many governments that signal retrenchment and privatisation of public assets.
24. Janine Brodie, 'Globalization, Insecurity and the Paradoxes of the Social', in Bakker & Gill (eds), Power, Production and Social Reproduction, pp. 46-65.
25. Diane Elson, 'Male Bias in Macro Economics: The Case of Structural Adjustment', in Diane Elson (ed.), Male Bias in the Development Process (Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 3.
26. See, for instance, Isabella Bakker, The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy (Zed Books, 1994).
27. Ingrid Palmer, 'Public Finance from a Gender Perspective', World Development, Vol. 23, No. 11 (1995), pp. 1981-6.
28. See http://www.gender-budgets.org.
29. Shahra Razavi, The Political Economy of Care in a Development Context (UNRISD, 2007).
30. Jean Pyle, 'Globalization, Transnational Migration and Gendered Care Work: Introduction', Globalizations, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2006), pp. 283-95.
31. There was a considerable debate in Feminist Economics between Tony Lawson, Sandra Harding, Dru Barker and others about critical realism and ontology vs epistemology/standpoint within feminism (1999-2003). The Lawson argued for a critical realist ontology for feminist social sciences; he was roundly critiqued for: (a) assuming a common human nature - which reflects a notion of shared human needs (Nussbaum) and may potentially lead to oppressive forms of universalising especially if science is blind to underlying structures of power; (b) ignoring how economics is a discourse; and (c) not specifying what are the grounds for shared human objectives - interests, needs and motives? Haraway suggests that marginalised viewpoints are necessary not because they are epistemically privileged, but because feminist objectivity requires the joining of partial and situated views for the connections and openings such knowledge creates.
32. Bakker & Gill, Power, Production and Social Reproduction, p. 21.
33. Margaret Radin, Contested Commodities (Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 104.
34. Sue Himmelweit, 'Domestic Labour', in Janice Peterson & Meg Lewis (eds), The Elgar Companion of Feminist Economics (Edward Elgar, 1999), p. 28.
35. Jane Jenson, 'Who Cares? Gender and Welfare Regimes', Social Politics Vol. 4, No. 2 (1997), pp. 182-7.
36. Nancy Folbre, 'Demanding Quality: Worker/Consumer Coalitions and "High Road" Strategies in the Care Sector', Politics & Society, Vol. 34, No. 1 (2006), pp. 11-15.
37. Feminist interventions in discussions of governance have evaluated the construction of historically specific gender orders and how they integrate processes of production and social reproduction. See Robert Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Polity, 1987).
38. Linda McDowell, 'Life Without Father or Ford: The New Gender Order of Post-Fordism', Transactions, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1991), pp. 400-19.
39. Elisabeth Prugl, 'Toward a Feminist Political Economics', International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2002), pp. 31-6.
40. Sylvia Walby, 'Gendering the Global', Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1998), pp. 326-7.
41. V. Spike Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (Routledge, 2003), pp. 15-16.
42. There are some exploratory attempts to link gender questions to the international financial architecture which increasingly conditions the material and discursive aspects of social reproduction. See Irene Van Staveren, 'Global Finance and Gender', in Jan Art Scholte & Adrien Schnabel (eds), Civil Society and Global Finance (Routledge, 2002), pp. 228-46.
43. Diane Elson, 'International Financial Architecture: A View from the Kitchen', Femina Politica, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2002), pp. 26-37.
44. Marieke De Goede, Virtue, Fortune and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
45. Janine Brodie, 'Globalization, Governance and Gender: Rethinking the Agenda for the Twenty-First Century', in Louise Amoore (ed.), The Global Resistance Reader (Routledge, 2005), p. 247.
46. Isabella Bakker, 'Neoliberal Govenance and the New Gender Order', Working Papers, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1999), pp. 49-59.
47. See Marta Guiterrez, Micro-economics: Making Gender Matter (Zed Books, 2003).
48. Saskia Sassen, 'Towards a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy', in Saskia Sassen (ed.), Globalization and its Discontents (New Press, 1998), pp. 81-100.
49. Brodie, 'Globalization, Governance and Gender', p. 251.
50. Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 38-9.
51. Thomas Lemke, 'The Birth of Bio-Politics: Michel Foucault's Lecture at the College de France on Neoliberal Governmentality', Economy and Society, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2001), pp. 190-207.
52. Brodie, 'Globalization, In/security and the Paradoxes of the Social', p. 63.
53. Isabelle Barker, 'Importing Care: The Transnational Dimensions of Neo-liberal Governmentality', Center for International Studies Papers, Bryn Mawr College, 2007, p. 10.
54. Meg Luxton & Kate Bezanson, Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy challenges Neo-liberalism (McGill-Queens University Press, 2006).
55. Helen Jarvis, 'Home Truths about Care-less Competition', International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2007), pp. 207-14.
56. Cindi Katz, 'The State Goes Home: Local Hyper-Vigilance of Children and the Global Retreat from Social Reproduction', Social Justice, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2001), pp. 47-56.
57. Sallie Marston, 'The Social Construction of Scale', Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2000), pp. 219-24.
58. Jarvis, 'Home Truths'.
59. Brian Marks & Sallie Marston, 'Progress or Regress?', Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2005), pp. 1-4.