Beyond the household: racialized women’s collective community care work

Abstract Feminist economics scholars have identified care work, in both its paid and unpaid forms, as a crucial economic activity that reproduces people’s sustenance and their labour power, but the gendered division of labour in care work contributes to persistent forms of inequality, oppression, and exploitation by class, race, and gender. Analyses of care work focus largely on its provision by the household in its unpaid form, as well as by the market and the state in the form of paid care work. In this paper, however, we expand the discussion of care work by using Banks (2020)’s approach for examining unpaid work provisioned collectively and performed predominantly by racialized women on behalf of their communities. We demonstrate how unpaid care work in communities arises in part as a response to forms of economic harms and exclusion. Often, though not exclusively, unpaid care work in communities takes the form of social activism, but the contributions of collective care work have been unseen by care work frameworks that are limited to the household, market, and the state. We examine several case studies of racialized women’s unpaid care work in their communities to demonstrate the importance of this form of collective care: examples of mutual aid and collective care work by Black women in the United States, and global examples of Indigenous women’s collective care work in Brazil. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of understanding unpaid care work in communities and its policy relevance.