If Not Mere Metaphor . . . Sexual Economies Reconsidered

Divisions of Labor, or It’s Gender, Race and Sexuality, Stupid!

We can see the way the epistemic features I have outlined above limit our understanding of how gender, race, and sexuality matter to the economy and vice versa, to the extent that the very terms of our understanding are confined within a dominant cultural logic. Let me briefly illustrate this with respect to one important enabling concept for feminists thinking about the economy: the notion of the division of labor. Feminist theories of the sexual division of labor, which demonstrated the devaluation of certain kinds of work identified with women and known as “women’s work” or, more generally, reproductive work, comprise an extremely important corrective to theories focused solely on masculine-identified forms of productive labor as the sole source of capitalist value. This feminist identification of reproductive work as a hidden source of value as well as a devalued and unacknowledged creative force has had enormous implications for thinking about, among many other things, the role of gender socialization in organizing systemic inequalities of resources and income; undercompensated as well as unremunerated forms of sexual, affective, and biologically reproductive labor naturalized as intrinsic capacities of the female body, “freely” available for use, like natural resources (predicated upon the gendered, racialized construction of nature and slaves as “free,” exploitable resources); the role of marriage, the heterosexual family, and domestic households as economic strategies and sites of accumulation; socially discriminatory attitudes and exclusionary practices in the proletarianization process, labor movements, and anticapitalist struggle, as well as in the constitution of the social agents and institutions of capital; the uneven dynamics of valorization of different kinds of work and different sectors of the economy; and, more broadly, as the result of these gendered processes of organizing production, the increasing feminization of labor, consumption, and poverty characteristic of the current global situation. ¹

Critiquing the racial and international dimensions of this sexual division of labor, and the role of slavery and colonialism in shaping modern capitalist relations, feminists have also been able to better account for the reorganization of the world economy (and its New International Division of Labour) from the 1970s on, along lines of racial and national differences among women workers (and their respective kinds of gendered labor), and between women workers and women consumers, racial and national differences, that still define the divisions of labor of the globalized economy. ² This more nuanced, intersectional conceptualization of the social divisions of labor has enabled feminists to make analytically visible the multiple and contradictory sites of exploitation, antagonism, and resistance (a more variegated understanding of “social relations of production” beyond class relations) within contemporary capitalism that would otherwise remain invisible to a “purely” economic perspective. However, even as it has been inflected by hierarchical social differences of race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality as well as gender, the concept of divisions of labor has had the detrimental effect of reifying the dominant meanings of these analytical categories as forms of social subjectivity and identity. Hence, the persistent translation of gender, racial, and sexual categories into bodily subjects in the very normative logics that they were meant to critique. Martin Manalansan has critiqued recent social science scholarship on gendered global migration for its increasingly heteronormative framing of migrant “care work—and its related notions of domesticity and affect—as the work and inherent capacities of biologically reproductive heterosexual women.” ³ This reification of gendered, racialized labor as the work of third world women limits the very range of meanings, practices, and possibilities of gender and sexuality that might be operating not only within the economic activity we recognize as “care work” but also in and as part of the lifeworlds out of which “care workers,” whether normative or non-normative, produce themselves and perform their definitive tasks as providers of this labor.

Such critiques would seem to be answered by Gibson-Graham’s proposal to “query globalization,” that is, to undo the heteronormativity of a capitalocentric discourse of the economy and to dislocate its unity and hegemony “through a proliferative queering of the economic landscape and construction of a new language of economic diversity.” However, this attempt to diversify/queer the possibilities of economic being and activity, in my view, remains within a field of negotiation conceptualized through exchange. While they rightly expand the conception of the economy to include a whole range of economic activities that do not take capitalist forms (wage labor, commodity production) and non-capitalist, non-market, and alternative capitalist practices of production and transaction that operate within the global economy, their analytical resolution of these activities takes place at the level of subjects: “To include all of this work in a conception of a diverse economy is to represent many people who see themselves (or are labeled) as ‘unemployed’ or ‘economically inactive’ as economic subjects, that is, as contributing to the vast skein of economic relations that make up our societies.” ⁴

The fallout of their understanding is evident in their translation of “the subjectivity, motivations, and choices of migrant workers” who have migrated out of, and send remittances back to, their small municipality of Jagna, in the terms of the gains (goods) of citizenship in developed countries. Hence: “Filipina contract migrants working as domestic helpers or live-in caregivers are seeking to fund the necessaries of life that are elsewhere provided as part of a commons . . .. What citizens of host countries are availed as a commons is for Filipina migrants something to be purchased individually, out of the proceeds of their labor (the necessary labor fund).” ⁵

Now, the excess (of norms) is not only on the side of impeded possibilities. The dominant social relations of production also enable and license forms of sexuality and sexual practice in excess of the norms of civil society that have grave consequences for the new economic subjects of feminized labor, as exemplified in the mass feminicides in Juárez, Mexico. ⁶

As I have argued elsewhere, systemic-oriented, exchange-focused analyses of feminized labor in the context of globalization often fail to recognize the forms of social, communicative, sexual, and affective capacities and cultural practice, particularly when those forms of experiential activity exceed the codes of understanding which derive from the analysis of a dominant cultural logic. ⁷ I have attempted to suggest that an inordinate attention to the level of exchange, whether in the conception of subjects or the division of labor, draws us away from attending to the range of practices that go into the very making of such subjects (the making of labor) beyond the codes of gender, race, and sexuality as categories of subjectivity and identity, or, for that matter, as unequal social relations of exchange. ⁸ More than conflating an analytical structure with a structure of experience (or conflating gender with women), we risk making particular sets of relations of difference, which serve as organizing principles and consequences of specific concrete assemblages such as advanced capitalist modernity, the very theoretical meaning of these categories. In this way, we subsume other possible theoretical, political accounts that might be obtained from the practices of labor, sociality, and freedom or flight operating within this order as necessary, tangential, and surplus but also subaltern modes of life.

The problem as I see it would lie in leaving “gender, race, and sexuality” as fixed codes, as if there weren’t other social axiomatics—other forms of selfhood and political ontologies&mash;within which the life practices to which they refer (and others we might not recognize as such) might be differently coded, regulated, and transformed. This is not a question simply of uncovering overlooked practices, but of drawing them into another potential project, i.e., recasting them through theoretical frameworks that do not easily translate them into readily available ideals of justice, empowerment, and freedom, but in fact force us to extend our thinking or action to find out what these ideals might yet mean and look like.

More than a failure to uncover hidden cultural resources—the “fugitive energies” that exceed given subjective identities—there is a lack of cultural literacy for interpreting such resources and energies, as well as for recognizing others who would otherwise remain outside of this restorative political purview. Let me now turn to some of my own recent thinking on these matters, and in particular to a few concepts that have preoccupied me for a number of years now, including recent critical perspectives on these concepts and how I view their relevance for feminist reconsiderations of the economic.

1. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, “Women and the Subversion of the Community” in Materialist Feminism. Zillah R. Eisenstein, ed. Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979). Christine Delphy, “For a Materialist Feminism.” Claudia von Werlhof, “Women’s Work: The Blind Spot in the Critique of Political Economy” in Women: The Last Colony, ed. Maria Mies. Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production. Routledge, 1978. Ann Ferguson, “On Conceiving Motherhood and Sexuality: A Feminist-Materialist Approach.” Leopoldina Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. Trans. Hilary Creek. New York: Autonomedia, 1995. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.” Also see Rose Brewer, fn. 2. [↑]
2. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour. London and New York: Zed Books Ltd.,1986. June Nash and Maria Patricia Fernandez Kelly, eds. Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983). There are too many other feminist analyses of the international division of labor to provide an exhaustive list here. It should suffice to point out that more recent feminist analyses of globalization have only elaborated on or qualified but not theoretically questioned or substantially transformed the notion of the international division of labor as it was proposed in these earlier feminist works. See, for example, Rachel Salazar-Parreñas, “Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor,” Gender and Society, 14. 4 (August 2000): 560-581[↑]
3. Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm,” The Scholar and the Feminist Online, Issue 6.3 (Summer 2008). www.barnard.edu/sfonline/immigration/manalansan_01.htm.[↑]
4. Postcapitalist Politics, p. 63.[↑]
5. Postcapitalist Politics, 177.[↑]
6. Ileana Rodriguez, “Perverse Subjects” (Unpublished paper).[↑]
7. “Prostituted Filipinas.”[↑]
8. Conceived within a juridical framework of civil society, intersectionality can in fact be said to have only reinforced the epistemic ground of exchange on which the notions of divisions of labor and bioeconomic subjectivity are predicated.[↑]