Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2008

Department

Journalism

Abstract

Recent methodological advances in Canadian Social Reproduction Feminism foreground labor as a foundational concept of social theory and, as a result, address the structuralist bias critics of the paradigm have identified, while still grounding theory in a comprehensive analysis that accounts for specifically capitalist relations. Yet, to fully address issues of racialization, this broad and dynamic concept of labor needs to be extended and complexified. Along with accounting for the sex-gender dimensions of labor, we need also to attend to its socio-spatial aspects. In other words, it’s not just what we do to reproduce society, but where we do it that counts in an imperial capitalist world. And Social Reproduction Feminism, with its expansive definition of labor and its comprehensive focus on the full spectrum of practical activity, is uniquely positioned to accommodate such complexity without forfeiting attentiveness to social relations of class and/or capitalism. It has the potential, therefore, to provide intersectional analyses with a methodology that brings “both capitalism and class back into the discussion.”

Comments

This article was originally published in Race, Gender & Class, 15(1-2): 42–57. © 2008 Race, Gender & Class. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.

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