Department of Feminist Studies

What is work? Who is a worker? How does law and social policy shape our understandings of these terms? What is at stake when only wage workers are endowed with worker status? That limitation excludes unpaid caregiving and other forms of nonmarket production. Indeed, even within waged work, specific forms of employment take precedence, privileging industrial jobs associated with adult white men and marginalizing much agricultural, household, and other service work. How does this dual structure, both bounding and dividing labor markets, create precarious conditions for people of color, immigrants, women, and others who face exclusion from privileged forms of work, consignment to subordinated forms of work, and denial that their labors constitute work at all?

Introduction to the "Working at Living: The Social Relations of Precarity" working group.

In our push to measure contemporary forms of precarity under globalization—especially that attached to the symbolic value of female and feminized labor at the center of economic consolidation and wealth—we do a grave disservice to ignore the history of the economic and social transformation proposed by development policy makers during the era of decolonization. Decolonization presented global finance capital with a new set of challenges for management and domination of the global order especially since women had played such key roles in anti-colonial movements. Under the guise of development the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) promised to apply technological solutions and modernizing beliefs to fix poverty and to help women achieve their goals for economic independence. Development coupled extant ideologies about and aspirations for mobilizing women’s reproductive capacities, unpaid labor, and women’s management of resources and economies in order to render these capacities and social relations into worker identities and consciousness.