Brunella Casalini

Costruzione della nazione e «riproduzione della razza» negli Stati Uniti d’America

Attraverso la classificazione giuridica della «bianchezza» (whiteness), come qualcosa di legato al sangue, le corti statunitensi, soprattutto dopo la guerra civile, l’emancipazione (1863-1865) e il riconoscimento della cittadinanza ai maschi neri con la ratifica del quattordicesimo e quindicesimo emendamento (1868-1870), hanno tentato di tracciare confini fissi, immutabili, oggettivi e neutri (in quanto ritenuti come geneticamente determinati) tra la razza nera e la razza bianca. Al fine di fissare i confini tra la razza bianca e la razza nera fu messo in opera un intenso lavorio culturale, giuridico e simbolico, che ha avuto molteplici espressioni: dalla legislazione statale contro i matrimoni misti, dichiarata incostituzionale solo nel 1967 con la sentenza Loving v. Virginia; alla costituzionalizzazione del sistema «separate but equal» introdotta con la sentenza Plessy v. Ferguson del 1896, all’intreccio tra nazionalismo, femminismo, maternita e riproduzione della razza, che sara qui oggetto di attenzione. Secondo i Feminist Race Studies, infatti, e sul terreno delle politiche sociali volte al controllo delle nascite e della maternita tra le fasce piu povere della popolazione che ancora si perpetrano, in modi sottili e inconsci, forme di discriminazione a sfondo implicitamente razzista.

A materialist analysis of contemporary feminist movements

Social movements on the left, such as the International Women’s Strike on 8 March 2017, see in the present moment a reorganization of capital accumulation in which gender, sexuality, race and class play significant roles. The 8 March strike, in particular, has been characterized by the willingness to emphasize and render visible the link between masculinist violence, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, and the dynamics of dispossession, privatization of common resources, and environmental destruction caused by neoliberal capitalism—dynamics that are rendering ever-wider strata of the population vulnerable to poverty, marginality and insecurity. This study draws on an analysis of the contributions that approaches such as social reproduction theory and the feminist reinterpretation of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought on primitive accumulation may make to understanding the present historical moment, in order to interrogate the nature of the contemporary struggles of feminist social movements.

Il care tra lavoro affettivo e lavoro di riproduzione sociale

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it reconstructs the early marxist feminist debate about reproductive labour, and its deep influence on the paradigm of affirmative biopolitics as well as on the development of the concept of ‘affective labour’. Secondly, it shows how the concept of affective labour, and other related concepts also present in the contemporary sociological literature (such as ‘emotional’ and ‘intimate’ labour), are still too broad and vague: they are not able to conceptualize effectively all the specific problems involved in the commodification of care work, by now a generalized phenomenon on a global scale. Joan Tronto’s political ethics of care offers, in comparison, a more precise and clearly delimited definition of ‘care’, starting from the ‘needy’ nature of every human being. Therefore, the use of such a definition can help us better to frame and to understand the transformations of contemporary welfare state.

Giustizia e famiglia in una prospettiva transnazionale

Contemporary theories of justice have only recently begun to pay attention to the international and global contexts, and their implications. In a global framework, it is now also necessary to give a fresh look at the old issue of family and justice. It is first of all the real situation of «transnational» families that has to be taken into consideration. Such families challenge traditional models in order to meet their own, new subsistence needs. Nowadays, as a matter of fact, millions of women travel and migrate alone to find jobs in the ever-expanding market of the personal services and care sector. Thus, it may happen that family members grow up and live in two or more different countries, fragmented, so to speak, and separated from each others most of the time. For these female migrant workers, new and old issues arise, as they move toward new ways of seeking a balance between their old family ties and the obligations of their novel employment forms. Some of these issues are: gender equity, the tension between equality of opportunity, and work, and family ties, the new character of old class, gender and ethnic inequalities, and so on. As the line between «rich» and «poor» countries is being re-drawn, both care labour commodification and its ethnic, gender and class redistribution change accordingly, and take on new, unpredicted forms, which we try to analyse.

American Citizenship: Between Past and Present

One of the main principles of contemporary liberal thought is the idea that individuals possess a set of basic universal rights. However, liberals rarely address the tension between universal rights and membership of a particular body politic. In both A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, for example, Rawls (1971, 1993) envisages a closed society whose members are born and die as citizens. Free movement only figures as a basic right of citizens within a state (Smith, 1997, p. 481). All of the questions associated with the problems of inclusion and exclusion, immigration, and the rights of legal residents and illegal aliens living within national borders are left unasked and unanswered. Also left neglected are the challenges that these problems pose to the identity of a political community that aims consistently to protect and secure people’s rights.