Neferti Tadiar,
"If Not Mere Metaphor . . . Sexual Economies Reconsidered"
(page 4 of 6)
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.[19]
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.[20] 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."[21] 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."[22]
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)."[23]
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.[24]
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.[25] 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.[26]
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.
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