Abstract: Women’s increased participation in wage labor in the Global North since the 1970s has intensified and globalized a division of reproductive labor stratified by race and class. Additionally, the development of a for-profit care industry creates historical conditions to reevaluate the sociopolitical values embedded in the labor of love known as care. Care ethics, a subfield of feminist philosophy, proposes relationality as a universal feature of human embodiment, challenging the assumptions of the independent individual of liberal political theory; however, care ethics fails to account for the way that caring practices form a particular type of labor within capitalist social formations. Drawing on Marxist feminist interventions called social reproduction theory, I demonstrate how care as life-making in contemporary neoliberal society can be both complicit in and resistant to global capitalist accumulation. Ultimately, I argue that the international, racial divisions of waged reproductive labor demonstrate the indispensable role that care as reproductive labor could play in creating an international feminist working-class movement. Transnational feminist politics of care are required to provide an account of social reproductive struggles that deprioritize masculinist notions of struggle through acknowledging the powerful political potential latent in practices of care for both waged and unwaged care workers.
Rhiannon Lindgren (Wed,) studied this question.