Isabella Bakker

Social Reproduction and the Constitution of a Gendered Political Economy

This review essay outlines and compares several recent contributions in feminist political economy with particular emphasis on the renaissance of the concept of social reproduction. Most definitions of social reproduction relate to three aspects: (a) biological reproduction of the species, and the conditions and social constructions of motherhood; (b) the reproduction of the labour force which involves subsistence, education and training; and (c) the reproduction and provisioning of caring needs that may be wholly privatised within families and kinship networks or socialised to some degree through state supports. Whereas discussions of social reproduction in the 1970s and 1980s focused on women’s domestic labour as subsidising capitalist reproduction under Fordism, more recent interest in the concept reflects the increasingly privatised forms of social provisioning and risk that characterise the neoliberal moment in the global political economy. In other words, the everyday activities of maintaining life and reproducing the next generation are increasingly being realised through the unpaid and paid resources of (largely) women as states withdraw from public provisioning, with the result that capitalist market relations increasingly infiltrate social reproduction. Hence, the renewed focus on social reproduction seeks to place its costs at the centre of an analysis of the capitalist system of accumulation as well as relating it to questions of how the surplus in such an economy is distributed. I will draw on a series of concepts and debates within feminist political economy literatures to help explain fundamental processes of restructuring in the global political economy of the early twenty-first century. A central assumption is that a historical feminist political economy approach is better able to make sense of the changing ontology of the global political economy than can New Political Economy, Vol. 12, No. 4, December 2007

Neo-liberal Governance and the Reprivatization of Social Reproduction: Social Provisioning and Shifting Gender Orders

The convergence of capitalist values and liberal conceptions of democracy is a global phenomenon, remaking notions of citizenship in the image of the market. The vehicle for this totalizing, conservative movement to a market-oriented model of citizenship is neo-liberalism. Here, I will trace the gender dimensions of this shift in industrialized countries with particular reference to the Canadian federal system. The Canadian case is an interesting one as it represents a multilevel system of governance and a political economy that is highly permeable to the effects of globalization.

Global Health and the Global Economic Crisis

Although the resources and knowledge for achieving improved global health exist, a new, critical paradigm on health as an aspect of human development, human security, and human rights is needed. Such a shift is required to sufficiently modify and credibly reduce the present dominance of perverse market forces on global health. New scientific discoveries can make wide-ranging contributions to improved health; however, improved global health depends on achieving greater social justice, economic redistribution, and enhanced democratization of production, caring social institutions for essential health care, education, and other public goods. As with the quest for an HIV vaccine, the challenge of improved global health requires an ambitious multidisciplinary research program.

Ontology, Method, and Hypotheses

Chapter 2 is concerned to advance some of the theoretical and practical agenda outlined at the end of Chapter 1 by introducing issues of ontology and epistemology so as to outline a methodological sketch to frame a number of our main hypotheses.

Global Political Economy and Social Reproduction

Chapter 1 serves as the general introduction to this book, and it should be read in conjunction with Chapter 2, which outlines ontological and methodological issues, and sketches our main hypotheses.