Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care

In Search of Economic Alternatives

Christine Bauhardt, Wendy Harcourt, Christine Bauhardt, Wendy Harcourt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317301929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book envisages a different form of our economies where care work and care-full relationships are central to social and cultural life. It sets out a feminist vision of a caring economy and asks what needs to change economically and ecologically in our conceptual approaches and our daily lives as we learn to care for each other and non-human others.

Bringing together authors from 11 countries (also representing institutions from 8 countries), this edited collection sets out the challenges for gender aware economies based on an ethics of care for people and the environment in an original and engaging way. The book aims to break down the assumed inseparability of economic growth and social prosperity, and natural resource exploitation, while not romanticising social-material relations to nature. The authors explore diverse understandings of care through a range of analytical approaches, contexts and case studies and pays particular attention to the complicated nexus between re/productivity, nature, womanhood and care. It includes strong contributions on community economies, everyday practices of care, the politics of place and care of non-human others, as well as an engagement on concepts such as wealth, sustainability, food sovereignty, body politics, naturecultures and technoscience.

Feminist Political Ecology and the Economics of Care is aimed at all those interested in what feminist theory and practice brings to today's major political economic and environmental debates around sustainability, alternatives to economic development and gender power relations.

1 Introduction

Conversations on care in Feminist Political Economy and Ecology

Wendy Harcourt Christine Bauhardt

Introduction: more questions than answers

The conversations leading to the making of the book have been held over the last five years as we walked the streets of Berlin and The Hague, visited each other’s rural retreats and organised meetings that reached out to others engaged in feminist political economics and ecology, as well as our MA and PhD students. In this introduction, we look at the issues at the core of these conversations by reviewing some of the questions and concepts which form the genesis of the book in order to map out for readers what is to come in the following chapters.

This book emerges out of many layers of conversations since we first met in Berlin five years ago. Though coming from different intellectual backgrounds we found, as feminist theorists, that we shared common interests in queer ecology, ecofeminism and alternatives to mainstream economies such as degrowth and solidarity economies. We were both interested in the gender-economic-environmental nexus in addressing issues of deep social inequality. We were both wanting to explore further the important contributions of feminist analysis to critiques of capitalism and the debate about what constitutes a good life. In particular, we felt that the economic and social value of social reproductive work done by women, both in the paid care sector as well as in the private sphere of families and interpersonal relationships and what this meant in terms of the current crises, needed more attention beyond feminist circles. Moreover, we discovered that we had published on these topics almost simultaneously (Bauhardt 2014, Harcourt 2014).

Our conversations traversed discussions on the new green deal, solidarity economies, the degrowth movement, community economies, buen vivir (living well), queer ecologies and ecofeminism. As we discussed how to envisage a different kind of economy, one that questions the assumption that economic growth is the basis for individual and social well-being, we found ourselves asking more questions than finding answers. Questions like: What does such a project imply in feminist terms? If care work and care-full relationships are central aspects of the post-growth society, in the realms of paid as well as unpaid care work, how could we revalue traditionally female activities and jobs? How can we bring awareness about the gendered practices of healthcare and care for the elderly, as well as better education and childcare into ecological economics? How do we conceive an economy that exploits neither humans nor the environment? What could the feminist vision of a caring economy look like in practice when productivity is understood as inseparable from re/productivity in people’s day-to-day activities? What possibilities do solidarity or community economies or post-capitalist politics offer in a feminist reassessment of the capitalist exploitation and hegemonic appropriation of the re/productivity of nature as well as of women and their work? What are viable solutions for the post-growth (post-capitalist) society, and how does the hierarchical gender order need to change in ways that respect both natural and social limits to growth? How do we understand care in economic and ecological terms with neither an assumed environmental resilience nor an assumed resilience of women’s care work? How can we learn to care for each other and non-human others in increasingly unequal, politically toxic and deteriorating natural environments?

Wendy Harcourt has summarised such post-capitalist concerns in an earlier essay as,

ways to live with and redefine capitalism aware of social and ecological limits and to see how to change our economic values to include care and respect for our families, communities, other knowledges and cultures. The concept of living economies proposes that we redesign our economies so that life is valued more than money and power resides in ordinary women and men who care for each other, their community and their natural environment. The challenge for the future is to build a broad platform for living economies or alternatives building up from community needs, which are inter-generational and gender aware, based on an ethics of care for the environment.

(Harcourt 2014: 18–19)

Such questions have led us to look for alternative visions for different ways of organising the economy based on the values of ecological, gender and social justice. We looked for ideas on alternatives to mainstream economics built on the ethics of care, gender justice, the centrality of responsibility for oneself and for human and non-human others and community livelihoods. Our conversations also looked beyond Eurocentric understandings of care in the search for intercultural, pluriversal, political, ecological rethinking of the economy and ecology beyond capitalist principles.

Our political and scholarly discussions challenged how to break down the apparent inseparability of economic growth and social prosperity and the invisibility of natural resource exploitation, while not romanticising social-material relations to nature. Most of all, we wanted to deconstruct the age-old intertwining of nature and femininity discourses. This is a huge challenge given the centuries-old analogy between the life-creating potential of both nature and the female body.

These questions were informed by earlier feminist writings about the ­relationship between gender relations and social relations to nature (Merchant 1980, Plumwood 1993, Braidotti et al. 1994, Mellor 1997). We also discussed the critiques of feminist political economists, feminist political ecologists and environmental feminists who are resisting the trend of a feminisation of environmental responsibility (Bauhardt 2013).

What we understood was that at the hub of all of these discussions is our diverse understandings of care.

The book explores the various understandings of care through a range of analytical approaches, contexts and case studies. The chapters reflect the multilevel conversations among feminist ecologists and feminist economists. On the one hand, these conversations highlight the importance of caring for humans and the more-than-human world in ecological economics. On the other hand, they stress the necessity to think through the still awkward (even romantic and essentialising) connection between women and nature, a problematic that has been sidelined during the last two decades in feminist theory. We have welcomed how feminist environmentalism has again become a vivid field of research, inspired by New Materialism (Alaimo and Hekmann 2008, Coole and Frost 2010), the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006) and the new Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) (Harcourt and Nelson 2015).

In the following we introduce the readers to the book’s discussions in four sections. The first section discusses the diverse meanings of care in the feminist economic and feminist ecological political debates, paying particular attention to the complicated nexus between re/productivity, nature, womanhood and care. We then look in section two at the discussions that use care as a conceptual tool to imagine how to go beyond capitalism with a focus on the contributions of community economies, everyday practices of care, the politics of place and care of non-human others. In a third section we discuss three concepts that weave throughout the book – the concept of naturecultures, the debates around gender and sustainability, alternatives to development and body politics. The last section looks at the shared visions that underpin the book.

Diverse meanings of care

The jumping off point for our discussion on care in the book is that care is about how communities organise their community and their livelihoods. Care is about looking after and providing for the needs of human and non-human others; it is about the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance and protection of humans and the more-than-human world (Tronto 1993). Care is also assumed to be linked to the sense of feeling affection or liking or love. In interpersonal relationships, care often means to give or provide for the well-being of those who cannot take care of themselves because of age or disability. This work is characterised by its time intensity, the continual requirements of the dependents and the inability of the carer to postpone the care needs. Care work can be performed as unpaid work in households and communities or as work for wages in childcare facilities, in hospitals or in nursing homes for the elderly. Empirically, and globally, this work is mostly done by women and it is socially considered to be ‘women’s work’ (Budlender 2010). The symbolic gender order of masculinity and femininity naturalises this understanding of women’s work in the care sector. It is hardly valued in capitalist and patriarchal societies which take care work for granted (Waring 1988, Benerì a 2003).

Related to understandings of care for feminist political economists is the concept of social reproduction which builds on the Marxist concept of individual and collective reproduction of the workforce. Whereas in the field of political economy the working subject is a person with a contract, income and social recognition, Feminist Political Economy emphasises the prerequisites for the wage relationship: The next generation of workers has to be born, brought up and educated, and this work is done by female members of the family and community. Family income is designed to enable the male worker to reproduce his workforce in the home. The heterosexual family structure ensures that women are available for this essential work which is performed outside the wage contract and delegated to the sexual contract (Pateman 1988). Despite its indispensability, this work is unpaid and receives little social recognition. Feminist Political Economy thus sees a parallel between the exploitation of industrial work in the capitalist production mode by capitalists and the exploitation of housework in the reproductive sphere by each ‘head of household’ and ‘breadwinner.’

Silvia Federici adds to this classic picture that women need to disentangle their social reproduction from the world market and in solidarity amongst North and South. She advocates for a ‘communalisation/collectivisation of housework,’ reversing the capitalist privatisation of reproductive work. She argues that ‘women must build the new commons, so that they do not remain transient spaces, temporary autonomous zones, but become the foundation of new forms of social reproduction’ (Federici 2011). Christine Bauhardt in her chapter provides a more in-depth view to these debates among feminist political economists.

Another set of authors look at care in relation to what Tronto speaks about as repairing our world that ‘includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’ (Tronto 2017: 31). Harcourt looks at how care in terms of self, community and others is inspired by different feminist theorists, in particular Val Plumwood. Harcourt revisits history and interspecies care as she asks us to reimagine ourselves ecologically as we link environmentalism and social justice, understanding our connection with the world of animals, plants and minerals – what Plumwood poetically calls Earthothers (Plumwood 1993: 137). Harcourt looks at care as not only about acts of love and friendship but also about appropriate reciprocity among the human and non-human natural world through practices that respectfully acknowledge the agency of all beings in the world. Her message is that such acts of care require acts of imagination to reappropriate, reconstruct and reinvent our personal and political lifeworlds (Escobar and Harcourt 2005).

Jacqueline Gaybor takes up Tronto’s understanding of care in her discussion of menstrual activism in Argentina to look at how care goes beyond ‘the narrow confines of the private sphere’ (Tronto 1993: 7). Gaybor argues that caring for the body by menstrual activists can be seen as part of a broader relationship of caring for the environment and caring for the community and future generations.

Tronto’s idea of a life-sustaining web inspires Kelly Dombroski, Stephen Healy and Katharine McKinnon in their discussion of Care-full Community Economies highlighting the centrality of care work – women’s care work in particular – in the intellectual and empirical heritage of Community Economies Collective (CEC). They follow the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham on how to transform our economies in order to allow human and more-than-human communities to ‘survive well together’ and place care for planetary companions at the heart of our endeavours (Gibson-Graham et al. 2013). Their chapter looks at the ethical negotiations around everyday care practices and care concerns that community economies of care emerge.

Pamela R...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Nature, care and gender
• 3 White settler colonial scientific fabulations on otherwise narratives of care
• 4 Environmental feminisms
• 5 Climate change, natural disasters and the spillover effects on unpaid care
• 6 Care-full Community Economies
• 7 Care as wellth
• 8 Diverse ethics for diverse economies
• 9 Striving towards what we do not know yet
• 10 ‘The garden has improved my life’
• 11 Transnational reconfigurations of re/production and the female body
• 12 Menstrual politics in Argentina and diverse assemblages of care
• 13 Bodies, aspirations and the politics of place
• 14 Towards an urban agenda from a Feminist Political Ecology and care perspective
• Index