Feminization & globalization
Date
2024
Authors
Gavrilenko, Alena
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Publisher
University of Victoria
Abstract
The present study investigated the effect of socialized, community-based services on the liberation of women by revisiting the revolutionary feminist ideas of the 1970s, and conducting an analysis of the contemporary implications of those policies. Socialist feminists have conceptualized a continuum of sites of exploitation within the home and the care economy, including sites of industrial production system associated with capitalism. Under these social conditions, some argue that women’s liberation must take the form of a step-by-step process, beginning from the recognition of the struggle itself, through the demand of “Wages for Housework”, and ending with the establishment of institutions to “socialize” gendered private domestic labor (Forrester 2022, 1278). These institutions would bring women’s labor into the public domain through, for example, publicly funded child-care, laundering, and cleaning services controlled by the community (Federici 2012, 49). However, these practices of socializing housework have been counteracted by the “globalization of care”, and domestic workers have also been on a rapid decline since the late 20th century (Klots 2024, 273). To aid globalization, structural adjustment policies of the IMF and WTO have also led to a restructuring of the world economy by recentering reproductive labor in the home and destroying local markets of developing countries through mass land and industry privatization, fueling the global hegemony of capitalist relations (Federici 2012, 85-90). Therefore, given the short vitality of the socialist vision and inequalities present within both socialist and capitalist implementations, more research is needed to discover alternative solutions.
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Keywords
socialism, feminism, capitalism, globalization