SOC352H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Social Reproduction, Marilyn Waring, Neoliberalism
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Lecture 3
For today:
• Recap: social reproduction and emotional labour
• Expanding on care
• Social Reproduction expanded
• Invisible labour
• Care deficit
Recap
• 2 conceptualizations of social reproduction
o social reproduction as regeneration and reproduces dominant ideologies
• What is emotional labour?
o the emotional investment that is a part of labour
▪ also refers to the management of feelings of the job and create the desired
outcome for jobs like customer service, or nursing
• Expanding on care
o Two aspects of care, the emotional investment and the desire to take action to improve
the persons’ wellbeing
o Women are working more than ever and working more than men, even part of their work
is invisible
Expanding on Care
• Care = emotional investment in another person’s well-being + a desire to take action to improve
someone’s well-being
• Care work “provides a face-to-face service that develops human capabilities of the recipient”
(England, Budig, and Folbre)
o Expands on the conceptualization of care work
o Considers care as a type of work
o Human capabilities refers to skills that make people useful to themselves and others
o Not enough to just say its just emotional labour
o Care work involves the Emotional aspect plus physical labour
o So care is different from care work
• Care work as nurturance and reproductive labour (Duffy)
o Classifies care work as having two aspects
▪ Nurturance (the emotional aspect)
• Care is a process with a strong emotional dimension and is based on
human connection
• Survey a range of literature that defines care work as nurturance
• Finds nurturance is seen as a unique practice with an emphasis on
relationality
• The idea of relationality connects to the face to face service aspect
mention in England et al. article
• Some work requires both emotional work and physical aspects
o Such as feeding someone
• But other work doesn’t require the emotional work
o Eg. Doing someone’s laundry or cooking for them
▪ Reproductive labour
Expanding on Social Reproduction
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• In the 1970s there were a series of academic debates from a variety of disciplines that focuses on
domestic labour debates
o Reproductive work is important for the regeneration of work
o While these debates were originally focused on making invisible work more visible
o Duffy looks at how scholars have seen reproductive labour has been examined in the past
o When we are looking at care work it is important to look at the different elements of
work to see how it is organized
• Work that is necessary to ensure the daily maintenance and ongoing reproduction of the labour
force
• Understanding reproductive labour outside the home
• Nurturance vs. reproductive labour: Which is more important?
o The way we define care work impacts the way we see and value care work
o Depending on whether we consider care work as nurturance or reproductive labour as
work creates differences in the number of people that are considered doing care work
o Thus the emotional aspect of care work is ignored sometimes and disincludes them in
certain forms of care work
• Black women are increasingly being part of the care work rather than the reproductive dirty
aspects of work
• Hispanic women are overrepresented in the dirty elements of reproductive work
• Different access to education and other services changes whether they are able to access the
different forms of work
• As they gain access to more services they are able to move away from the dirty aspects of work
and go towards the emotional work
• Duffy suggests that when reproductive work lacks the need of emotional aspects then racialized
women are more represented in this type of work
• This is where we see differences in emotional and menial work
• The bathroom jobs occupied by minorities are less paid than the public aspects of care work that
are occupied by white women
• While the devaluation of care work more broadly is important we should also look at the
racialized aspects of care work where the nurturing jobs are occupied by white women and have
more value, prestige and paid more than the menial work that are done by raciliazed or minority
women
• When nurturance is recognized it is more valued than menial work
• But the problem is that nurturance work is not always recognized
Invisible Labour
• Unrecognized, taken for granted form of work
o Remains as an invisible type of work
• Invisible labour in the home
o It is seen as invisible because there is no wage associated the work
o Started as production of work outside of the home, made the work being done inside the
home as invisible and unwage work
• Marilyn Waring exposes the way a traditional view of economics devalues reproductive labour,
making these unpaid forms of work invisible
o People who participate in care work are penalized in terms of wages especially when
looking at the requirements of skills that they have to be ready for
Historical reference to the 1980s
• A UN conference declared that there would be a decade for women to try to understand gender
inequality globally
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