affect, race, class

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Affect, Race, and Class An Interpretive Reading of Caring Lahor DRUCILLA K. BARKER AND SUSAN F. FEINER

Over the past two decades the relationships between women's roles in social reproduction, women's subordinate position in paid labor markets, and the marginalization of caring labor in capitalist economies have emerged as central concerns in feminist economics. This attention is warranted because the transnational feminization of the labor force and the neoliberal policies associated with globalization impinge on the types of activities that have come to be called caring labor. Women have increased their participation in the paid-labor force but on a highly unequal footing. When relatively affluent women enter the labor market, they are able to use some of their income to purchase the domestic services no longer produced in the home, services provided mainly by poor women from minority, working-class, or ThirdWorld immigrant backgrounds. The pressures created by the neoliberal policies accompanying globalization leave these women with few options other than to participate in the poorly paid, insecure, and devalorized segments of the transnational market for domestic labor, often forgoing the care of their own children and families. At least since the nineteenth century, caring for others has been associated with feminine identity. Caring labor—attending to the physical and emotional needs of others—has been considered the quintessential form of "women's work." But just what sort of work it is has been a matter of debate since at least the eighteenth century. This debate was part of the larger question concerning the appropriate way to specify the construction ofthe "economy" by drawing a boundary between those human activities that were part of the economy and those that were not. As the heterodox economist David Brennan has argued, the classical political economists began by narrowing the definition of what counted as economic activities to include only those activities for which people were paid a wage or those that created goods or services for exchange.' Activities undertaken for their own sake, such as gaz-

Barker and Feiner: Affect, Race, and Class

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