Broadening the Options: Inflecting Quebec’s Post-Industrial Trajectory (original) (raw)
Related papers
One of the core aims of economic geography is to explore people-place relationship. The geography of feminist economics, one of the sub-disciplines of economic geography, aims to study the gendered nature of economic processes, confined largely to the issues of work and labor. This article addresses the notion of work and labor that has been central to feminist political economy. These two notions have been contested extremely with different meanings, as documented by feminists, with many different claims to what, where and how these notions should actually be studied to signify the politics of gender. For this, the article first, examines the dualisms of public/private dichotomy and the notion of power, to challenge the notion of work as opposed to home. Secondly, it sheds light on the continuous increase in the number of women in employment, especially after the end of the Second World War, though spatially uneven across the globe, referred commonly as the feminization of the labo...
Research Note: Rethinking Feminist Engagements with the State and Wage Labour
Feminists Law, 2014
This note draws on previously published work which has reflected on the (dis)continuities between two different types of feminist engagement with the state and the wage society (Alessandrini, 2011, 2013). The aim is to raise questions the network, with its focus on gendering labour law, might consider worth pursuing as part of its future research agenda. Even though I am not a labour lawyer, I have an interest in labour theory and this comes from a particular tradition, that of feminist autonomists who have critically interrogated Marx's labour theory of value, that is, the theory according to which labour is the source of value in capitalist economies, by paying specific attention to the role of social reproduction. 1 I draw on this tradition for two interconnected reasons: first because I think it offers important resources for thinking about the links between gender, labour and value in today's post-Fordist economies, exactly at a time when these links appear to have become more tenuous; secondly because it provides the opportunity to think about the sort of arrangements that might be able to affect these links, thereby shifting current value-making processes.
Nancy Fraser's book is a collection of essays written from 1985 to 2010 by the American socialist feminist philosopher and critical theorist. It is a rich and complex text that aims at dissecting the "drama in three acts" that according to the author is the thread of second-wave feminism. If act one is the moment when the feminist movement joined radical movements to transform society through uncovering gender injustice and capitalism's androcentrism, in act two Fraser highlights with regret a switch from redistribution to recognition and difference and a shift to identity politics that risk to support neoliberalism in its efforts to build a free market society. In act three, still unfolding, the problem of justice is reframed and the relationships between a feminist movement meant to be radical and the changes in act in present times has the potential to open new unpredictable scenarios. This is an important contribution because it provides a clear frame to rethink issues related to labour, emancipation, identity, rights claims at the core of political demands of justice in the contemporary context of neoliberism. The historical phases of the recent feminist movement are retraced through its critical tangles in a constant debate with political theory.
Fraser’s political philosophy creates a “thick,” nuanced understanding of justice as embodying a range of normative principles meant to inform political, economic and cultural practices. She considers what constitutes just social relations and values, who ought to be involved in such discussions, and how to deliberate to achieve justice within a globalizing world. Here Fraser is particularly concerned with the ways that various feminist theories and movements, have helped—and sometimes hindered—efforts to think about and organize movements of justice by and for women. In short, Fortunes of Feminism represents an ambitious re-theorizing of political philosophy from the standpoint of feminist concerns and struggles over the last four decades, offering up a universal political philosophy of justice informed by and informing women’s emancipation in the midst of a global crisis of world capitalism. The book is not without lacunae, however, and I conclude with two suggestions towards a more truly egalitarian—and ecological—feminist political philosophy, largely compatible with Fraser’s own framework.
The Impact of Liberalization on Female Workers in Quebec: Four Case Studies
Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 2013
Cet article explore l'impact de la libéralisation des marchés sur la main-d'oeuvre féminine au Québec. Il chercheà valider une intuition formulée par Brunelle, Beaulieu and Minier (2004) en guise de conclusion d'un rapport de recherche mettant en relief l'essor et la prolifération des marchés périphériques du travail dans le capitalisme mondialisé. Parce qu'elles sont surreprésentées dans le travail atypique, les auteurs se demandaient alors si la restructuration des marchés du travail avait des impacts négatifs les femmes. En nous appuyant sur quatreétudes de cas dans différents secteurs de l'économie (habillement, commerce de détail, télécommunications, services d'aideà domicile), l'article valide l' hypothèse d'une rehiérarchisation genrée du marché du travail sur la base de statuts d'emploi dans le sillage du processus de libéralisation.
Women and economy: complex inequality in a post-industrial landscape
This article looks at the workplace, home and welfare/state to explore intergenerational, dynamic inequality experienced by women around paid work. Based in a former coalfield, it brings women's paid work centre stage and resonates with the experiences of women (and men) living and working in other post-industrial places that grew out of a particular industry, suffered the trauma of industrial closure, redundancy and job loss, and coping with a new economy shaped by low pay and insecurity. To examine the dynamic element of inequality, the article draws upon Walby's (2009, Globalisation and Inequalities: Complexity and Contested Modernities, London: Sage) theory of 'complex inequality' to understand intersecting regimes of oppression. The article is based on ethnographic work in East Durham, England, including repeat in-depth group discussions with 31 women aged 16-90.
Economic restructuring and gender in Canada: Feminist policy initiatives
World Development, 1995
This paper examines Canadian policy responses to economic and political restructuring over the past decade and the attempts by feminist groups to influence this agenda. It considers the success of these attempts to have gender issues taken up in the macro policy environment and relates feminist policy positions to theoretical themes emerging from the feminist economic literature on macroeconomics and adjustment.
Feminising the Economy: Metaphors, strategies, politics
Gender Place and Culture, 2003
Within contemporary feminism, common approaches to feminizing the economy involve adding a sphere or sector or attributing a monetary value to women's unpaid labor. Each of these approaches is interested in creating an accurate representation of the real or 'whole' economy. But these representations are in the same lineage as mainstream economic conceptions; the economy remains a bounded entity that can be known by enumerating its parts. The 'adding on' and 'counting in' strategies employed by feminists complete the picture of what is needed to produce social wellbeing but do not necessarily help us think differently about how goods and services are or might be produced. In this paper, we ask how feminist economic theory might contribute to envisioning or enacting alternative economies. We find answers to this question through reading feminist interventions for glimmers of a deconstructive project that opens 'the economy' to difference. Pursuing these glimmers we attempt to insert the possibility of noncapitalist forms of economy including economies of generosity, nonprofit businesses, worker collectives and alternative capitalist enterprises impelled by a social or environmental ethic. In place of the view of the economy as a whole comprised of a pre-estab lished number of parts or sectors, we begin to see the economy as a discursive construct that can be reconstructed to contribute to social transformation.