Lisa Duggan, "(Re)Producing Social Justice After Neoliberalism"
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Ara Wilson's 2004 study, The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons and Avon Ladies in the Global City, introduces the term "intimate economies" defined as "the complex interplay between intimate social life and political economic systems in a context shaped by transnational capitalism."[9] Wilson uses "economies" rather than "economy" in order to accommodate the ways that a local kinship economy, folk economy and moral economy operate in relation to the global capitalist economy, thereby usefully denaturalizing and pluralizing the definition of a too often reified term.[10] Drawing from cultural anthropology to argue that economies incorporate social and cultural realms, and from social theory to show that social life is linked to economic affairs, Wilson deploys intimate economies in ways that resonate with the most expansive uses of social reproduction. She also incorporates a complex argument about the role of markets in shaping sexual possibilities—a crucially productive extension of the usual limits of that concept. Critiques of homonormative marriage politics within queer studies also pursue this extension, linking the lesbian and gay pursuit of domestic respectability to conformity with the demands of the neoliberal state and economy.[11]

Ultimately, the search for useful and flexible concepts is not only a project for scholars motivated primarily to explain contemporary political configurations and dilemmas. We need concepts that can help us intervene in them effectively. Right now, the separation of notions of economic and sexual justice, alongside parallel separations from racial and gender justice, leave us crippled in the face of neoliberal policy activists who are very skilled at creating false divisions, deploying substitutions and distractions, and generally forwarding their goals with category manipulations of all kinds. The U.S. public is induced to support aggression against Muslim and Arab populations through the deployment of images of "their" traditional gender and sexual mores vs. "our" modern egalitarian ways. Marriage is represented as a "values" issue, rather than a political and economic institution. Persistent racial inequality is represented as due to black family forms, rather than to political and economic histories and practices. Effective opposition to such political strategies requires clarity about the deep connections across the categories of political, economic, and everyday life. If feminists cannot illuminate the web of relationships between economic and sexual justice, for instance, there is no question that our opponents can manipulate them with relative impunity.

So there is a lot at stake, in our concepts as well as our theories, strategies and alliances. Perhaps a term like social reproduction can become expansive enough to illuminate the web of connections that is too flexible, shifting, complex and globally variable for the term intersectionality to capture. If it can't, then we'll need another one.

Endnotes

1. See Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Thought (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); and Lisa Duggan, Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), introduction and chapter 1. [Return to text]

2. See Sandy Soto, "Bridging las Américas: Transnational Feminisms and Subjectivities (A Roundtable Discussion)," American Studies Association, Oakland, CA, October 2006; and Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 211-217. Soto clearly elucidates the limits of the concept of "intersectionality." Puar proposes the Deleuzian concept of "assemblage" as a replacement for it. [Return to text]

3. For a brief history of the use of the term social reproduction, see Meg Luxton, "Feminist Political Economy in Canada and the Politics of Social Reproduction," in Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton, edtiors, Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-Liberalism (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2006), pp. 11-44. [Return to text]

4. Luxton for instance argues, in "Feminist Political Economy," that political economy's goal of studying society as a whole distinguishes it from poststructuralism, whose advocates do not endorse integrating all factors into one theory, but put forth fragments of provisional theories to deconstruct hegemonic systems (fn #9, p. 42-43). This is an old and familiar debate. This author is defending the earlier uses of the term social reproduction; I am arguing that the association with totalizing theory is a drawback that must be overcome by redefining the concept through engagement with the poststructuralist critiques that animate much contemporary cross-disciplinary feminist scholarship. [Return to text]

5. Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, "Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives," Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989), p. 383. [Return to text]

6. Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill, editors, Power, Production and Social Reproduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Bezanson and Luxton, Social Reproduction; Kate Bezanson, Gender, the State and Social Reproduction: Household Insecurity in Neo-Liberal Times (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). [Return to text]

7. Cindi Katz, Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. x-xi. [Return to text]

8. M. Jacqui Alexander, "Redrafting Morality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offenses Bill of Trinidad and Tobago," in Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, editor, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 133-152; Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). See also Rhacel Parrenas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Laura Briggs, "Making 'American' Families: Transnational Adoption and U.S. Latin America Policy," in Ann Stoler, ed., Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American Empire (Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 344-365, and Nancy Postero, Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Postmulticultural Bolivia (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). [Return to text]

9. Ara Wilson, The Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons and Avon Ladies in the Global City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 11. [Return to text]

10. For a historical denaturalization of the term "economy," see Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). [Return to text]

11. See, for instance, Anna Marie Smith, Welfare Reform and Sexual Regulation (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [Return to text]

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