The Double Register of History: Situating the Forgotten Woman and Her Household in Capitalist Commodity Chains

Abstract

By analyzing research and theoretical foci in its three major publication venues, we can judge how much attention the world-system perspective has been paying to women. After 25 years, women are only a faint ghost in the world-system perspective. In the ?rst twenty volumes of Review, less than 5 percent (16) of the articles deal with gendered exploitation, women, or households. In the ?rst ?ve volumes of the Journal of World-System Research, less than 4 percent of the articles address women’s issues.2 By 1999, PEWS had published 21 annual monographs; yet less than 5 percent of the articles in those volumes integrated women or gender inequities.

Bringing Commodity Chain Analysis Back to Its World-Systems Roots: Rediscovering Women’s Work and Households

“…In the second decade of the 21st century, feminists are still alarmed that "the gendered questions at the heart of international political economy continue to be neglected" (Bedford and Rai 20 I 0: 2). 5 With respect to households, the track record of all three intellectual threads is even worse, for these important structures of the capitalist world-system very rarely make an appearance in commodity chain analyses (Dunaway 2001(Dunaway , 2014. When their ground-breaking book was published, Gereffi and Korzeniewicz (1994: 12) admitted that the researchers had failed to assess the linkages between households and commodity chains.…”

“…2 While there are significant differences among these variants, what they have in common is that a majority of the accumulated research in each of these perspectives has "de-gendered" analyses of global production (Clelland and Dunaway 1995;Dunaway 2001;Dunaway 2014: 1-25). 3 Throughout the 1980s when commodity chain analysis was emerging as a field of study, feminists drew attention to the ways in which the widening of capitalism in the global South was integrating females into commodity production through non-waged labor mechanisms (e.g., Elson and Pearson 1981) and into export agriculture through paid and unpaid labors (e.g., da Corta and Venkateshwarlu 1999).…”

“…Stengers (1997: 113) and Keller (1982) advise us to stop giving ourselves permission to ignore research directions that focus on groups or questions that are typically ignored. In this regard, Marxist Daniel Singer (1999: 221-22) argues revised their conceptualization; see Dunaway (2012Dunaway ( , 2014.…”

“…Moreover, we must take special care when analyzing the work done inside women's households, for much of that work is aimed at the marketplace (Dunaway 2001). To varying degrees depending on their class and racial positions, women in the global South engage in a complex portfolio of agricultural and nonagricultural labors that are embedded in commodity chains, including: (a) unpaid labors to sustain the household, clan or family; (b) unpaid labors associated with biological reproduction and child rearing; ( c) unpaid labors that subsidize household-based male-dominated market farming or businesses; ( d) waged or salaried labor in formal documented contexts; ( e) waged or salaried labor in informal sectors; (f) production and/or selling of goods or services in the informal sector; (g) business operation inside or outside the household; and, (h) income-earning homework that is subcontracted by exporters.…”

The Semi-Periphery, World Revolution, and the Arab Spring: Reflections on Tunisia

“…Global accumulation may run along the axes of core, periphery, and semi-periphery, but as many feminist social scientists have pointed out, it also depends crucially on divisions of gender and class and race/ethnicity. In particular, the varied forms of female labor-situated as they are along the many nodes of global commodity chains-contribute significantly to the world's surplus value (Bair 2010;Dunaway 2001Dunaway , 2014. Equally important is the rising of feminist consciousness and political activism in the semi-periphery and the more advanced periphery.…”