SOC352H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Reproductive Labor, Social Reproduction, Emotional Labor
Mignon Duffy (2005), “Challenges for Feminists Conceptualizing Care at the Intersections
of Gender, Race, and Class” in Gender & Society 19.1
Abstract
• Uses census data to asses two alternative theoretical perspectives of care work for
understanding the intersections of gender, race, and economic inequalities in paid care.
• The nurturance conceptualization focuses on care as relationship while the reproductive
labor frame- work includes both relational and nonrelational jobs that maintain and
reproduce the labor force.
• placing increasing theoretical emphasis on nurturant care privileges the experiences of
white women and excludes large numbers of very-low-wage workers from consideration.
Introduction
• the increase of women’s participation in the paid labour force and a dramatic aging of the
population has left the U.S with a care deficit
• there is mounting concerns of the quantity and quality of care for dependents
• Feminist scholars look at the care givers and the challenges they have
• Uses an intersectional analysis
• There is now a low wage servant class that do the caregiving, which consists mainly of
racialized minorities
• White middle and upper middle class have made gains in the labour force by transferring
the care work that used to their full time unpaid job onto other women
• Feminists are accountable for this exploitation of coloured women because of the
feminist role for the opening of professions to women
• analyze the historical development of the paid care labor force, focusing on the gender,
race, and immigration status of the care workers as well as the wage levels of the jobs.
Conceptualizing care
• two major conceptual frameworks for understanding care
o nurturance
o reproductive labour
• In both scholarly and popular arenas, the most common understanding of care is that of
work that involves caring for children, the elderly, and those who are ill or disabled.
• The tendency in theoretical development has been to move away from the associa- tion
with the dependency of care receivers as the defining characteristic of care work.
• Nurturance
• Reframe care as relationality and independence
• define care in terms of the nature of the activity itself rather than based on the population
to which it is directed.
• Authors discuss care as a unique practice, skill or way of thinking with an emphasis on
relationality
• Tronto and Fisher
o “Caring about” involves paying attention to the needs of oth- ers, a part of the
process that presupposes a relational connection and includes an emotional
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dimension.
o Taking care of” taking responsibility for meeting those needs in some way.
o “Caregiving,” engaging in the “hands-on” daily tasks of care, is the aspect most
frequently focused on in the literature.
o “care-receiving,” emphasizes that care happens within the context of a two- way
relationship rather than as a one-way dispersal of services.
• Feelings, responsibility, responsive action and relationship
o Defining characteristics of care as an activity, whether that activity is happening
within a family or within another institution, in a paid or an unpaid context.
• Caring labour is work that provides a face to face service and develops the capabilities of
the recipients
• Care workers can also include people like therapists, social workers, etc. these people are
care workers that are better paid and more educated
• It is the gaining popularity as a theory
• The presence within the care literature of another theoretical stand related to earlier
feminist conceptions of domestic labour and social reproduction
• Reproductive labour
• originally framed as a way of bringing wom en’s unpaid work in the home into the
discourse of Marxist economics
• allowed scholars to relate womens work as an activity that supports and maintains
productive work and productive workers.
• The discussion is not of feelings or of relationship but rather of the important role of this
work in the econ- omy. Reproductive labor is defined as work that is necessary to ensure
the daily maintenance and ongoing reproduction of the labor force.
• While originally formulated as a way to describe unpaid work, later feminists have
expanded the concept to bridge the unpaid and paid spheres.
• Like the nurturance framework of care, the concept of reproductive labor has been
operationalized and used in empirical study by numerous scholars.
• The boundaries of reproductive labor are increasingly hard to define in a service
economy in which fewer and fewer workers are engaged in production in the classic
Marxist sense (criticism)
• Comparing the two frameworks
• The theoretical starting point is different in both frameworks
o nurturant care, the emphasis is on the nature of the activity as inher- ently
relational
o while conceptualizations of reproductive labor focus on the role of the work in
maintaining and reproducing the labor force.
• The assumption of the centrality of relationship to care, the foundation of the nurturance
framework, is absent in discussions of reproductive labor.
• While later theorizing about reproductive labor has become more explicit in its
acknowledgment of the important emotional work involved in some of these tasks, the
concept itself is much broader and less dependent on emotional connection than care
viewed through a nurturance lens.
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