Abstract
One of the highlights of this superb collection of essays on gendered commodity chains, a highlight partly because it draws on the historically seminal work on commodity chains by Immanuel Wallerstein (who is also responsible for the Foreword), is that the authors make liberal reference to pioneering scholars in the fields of women’s paid and unpaid work such as Lourdes Benería, Diane Elson, Ruth Pearson, Veronika Bennholdt-Thompson, and Maria Mies. These writers broke critical new analytical ground in the 1970s and 1980s in emphasizing the ways in which “production” and “reproduction” were profoundly interlinked with one another. To revisit their perspectives on the myriad forms of female labor that contribute to the accumulation of capital makes for a volume that does serious—and justifiably due —service to feminist theorizing and knowledge over nearly 50 years. Yet while avoiding the all too common fetishization to cite “just published” papers, the collective contributions to Wilma Dunaway’s Gendered Commodity Chains also provide an impressively up-to-the-minute conceptual and empirical mapping of the various ways in which contemporary global capitalism profits from the externalization of so many of its costs to women and their households, and especially the poorest on the periphery of the international economy. Here we have an effective “potted history” of reflections on the “value-added” of female labor, which makes for eminently rich pickings, research and teaching-wise.
This is a volume with two main aims. The first is to promote awareness of the manifold contributions of women beyond “formal employment” to the global economy. The second is to delineate the diverse material and non-material impacts on women and their households of economic globalization. While being an edited volume, the book as a whole carries a hard-hitting and cogent argument relevant to the many incarnations of female exploitation, and any scholar interested in gender and neoliberalism in the twenty-first century should ignore it at their peril.
In the six main parts of the book, which include “Feminist Critiques and Advances of Commodity Chain Analysis,” “Conceptualizing Semiproletarianized Households and Workers in Commodity Chains,” “Women’s Labor and Threats to Social Reproduction and Commodity Chains,” “Integration of Indigenous and Peasant Households into Global Commodity Chains,” “Transnational Laborers as Commodities in Global Chains,” and “Conceptualizing Social Reproduction and Worker Resistance in Commodity Chains,” we are presented with a diverse range of geographical examples that draw from the “periphery,” “semi-periphery,” and “core” of the world economic system, including Nicaragua, the Philippines, Chile, Turkey, the former Soviet Union, Canada, and the United States. We are also privy to a very wide range of economic and employment sectors including nursing, sex work, export manufacturing, fishing, and globalized agriculture. Also impressive is the fact that the contributors were selected on the basis of having at least ten years of field experience and hail from a remarkably widespread array of disciplinary provenances.
In Dunaway’s informative yet concise editorial introduction, the historical and contemporary context for the discussion in the volume is set out very clearly, both in terms of the rising supply of female labor to global production systems, especially from the 1970s onward, as well as the origins of “commodity chain analysis” as established by Terence Hopkins’ and Immanuel Wallerstein’s early, Fernand Braudel-inspired work on world systems, in which the issue of gender was marked as extremely significant. Yet despite burgeoning feminist scholarship in the 1970s that emphasized how the internationalization of capitalist production to the Global South was informalizing and marginalizing female labor, Dunaway points out that this was largely ignored in mainstream accounts, with women and households conspicuous by their absence, to the great detriment of understanding the parameters of accumulation. To this end, Dunaway calls for disruption of the “false analytic divide” between production and reproduction, to the need to bring households into commodity chain analysis, to the importance of scrutinizing the links between the informal economy and commodity chains, and to consider women’s inequitable labor portfolio in global production.
While all chapters in the volume speak to the same basic theme, highlights from Dunaway include not only her comprehensive introduction, but also her dedicated chapter on the analytical importance of the household as a “portal” for recognizing how the unpaid labor mainly performed by women therein is crucial to capital’s extraction of surplus, which is further underlined by Don Clelland’s discussion of “dark-value-extraction chains.”
Additional theoretical weight is provided by Jane Collins’ chapter, “A Feminist Approach to Overcoming the Closed Boxes of the Commodity Chain,” while major substance to the underlying exploitation of women and gendered labor within households is delineated, inter alia, by Caren Bain in her analysis of the paradoxes and exclusions around women workers in fresh fruit agriculture in Chile, and by Marina Prieto-Carron in relation to women workers (and unemployed women) in Nicaragua. Perhaps the most illuminating and original chapter of the book, however, is that by Nicola Yeates on global nursing care chains, which not only introduces some vital new empirical detail on the diasporic movement of nurses from South to North, and within these regions, but which also grapples with some of the conceptual hiatuses around gendered “care chains” and gendered “commodity chains.”
Gendered Commodity Chains brings (back) gender into political economy in a major way. It reminds us of the fundamental importance of the materialities of female labor; and while the way gender intersects with class, socio-economic positioning, ethnicity, migrant status, and so on makes issues and arguments difficult to generalize, these should not be sidelined at the expense of how the poorest households in the poorest countries of the world bear the brunt of capital accumulation in an increasingly globalized world. This is a “must-read,” not only for academics, but also for policymakers and practitioners in the fields of development and gender. If there was ever a case for “mainstreaming” gender and households into development analysis and policy, this volume accomplishes this task more persuasively than legions of publications on “gender and development” over the past few decades in which meta-narratives have been somewhat eclipsed by post-modernist fears about over-generalization.