Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size I would like to thank the following for their valued comments: Kate Bezanson, Janine Brodie, Julian Germann, Stephen Gill, Adrienne Roberts and Hasmet Ulluorta as well as the editors of this journal. Notes 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 definition to the basic structures that have to be reproduced in order that social reproduction as a whole can take place. Felicity Edholm, Olivia Harris Margaret Benston, The Political Economy of Women's Liberation (New England Free Press, 1969); Heidi Hartman, 'The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class and Political Struggle', Signs, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1981) pp. 366–94; Antonella Picchio, Social Reproduction: The Political Economy of the Labour Market (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 14. 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 Mariama Williams, Gender Issues in the Multilateral Trading System: A Manual (Commonwealth Secretariat, 2003). 19. 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. 20. Janine Brodie, 'Globalization, Insecurity and the Paradoxes of the Social', in Bakker Ingrid Palmer, 'Public Finance from a Gender Perspective', World Development, Vol. 23, No. 11 (1995), pp. 1981–6. 23. See http://www.gender-budgets.org. 24. Shahra Razavi, The Political Economy of Care in a Development Context (UNRISD, 2007). 25. Jean Pyle, 'Globalization, Transnational Migration and Gendered Care Work: Introduction', Globalizations, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2006), pp. 283–95. 26. 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). 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. 27. Bakker Linda McDowell, 'Life Without Father or Ford: The New Gender Order of Post-Fordism', Transactions, Vol. 16, No. 4 (1991), pp. 400–19; Elisabeth Prugl, 'Toward a Feminist Political Economics', International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2002), pp. 31–6; Sylvia Walby, 'Gendering the Global', Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 4 (1998), pp. 326–7. 33. V. Spike Peterson, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (Routledge, 2003), pp. 15–16. 34. 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 Diane Elson, 'International Financial Architecture: A View from the Kitchen', Femina Politica, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2002), pp. 26–37. 35. Marieke De Goede, Virtue, Fortune and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 36. 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. 37. Isabella Bakker, 'Neoliberal Govenance and the New Gender Order', Working Papers, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1999), pp. 49–59. 38. See Marta Guiterrez, Macro-economics: Making Gender Matter (Zed Books, 2003). 39. Saskia Sassen, 'Towards a Feminist Analytics of the Global Economy', in Saskia Sassen (ed.), Globalization and its Discontents (New Press, 1998), pp. 81–100. 40. Brodie, 'Globalization, Governance and Gender', p. 251. 41. Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 38–9. 42. Thomas Lemke, 'The Birth of Bio-Politics: Michel Foucault's Lecture at the College de France on Neo-liberal Governmentality', Economy and Society, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2001), pp. 190–207. 43. Brodie, 'Globalization, In/security and the Paradoxes of the Social', p. 63. 44. Isabelle Barker, 'Importing Care: The Transnational Dimensions of Neo-liberal Governmentality', Center for International Studies Papers, Bryn Mawr College, 2007, p. 10. 45. Meg Luxton Sallie Marston, 'The Social Construction of Scale', Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2000), pp. 219–24. 48. Jarvis, 'Home Truths'. 49. Brian Marks & Sallie Marston, 'Progress or Regress?', Progress in Human Geography, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2005), pp. 1–4.
Isabella Bakker (Sat,) studied this question.