>
> I very much agree with Tahir on the urgent need for "radical critique
> without limits," including issues that ideology makes us think are "private
> problems." Esepcially with regard to gender, simply making laws
> gender-neutral in the so-called "public" spheres of paid employment (which
> is important & left incomplete) leaves the main locus of gender oppression,
> the generative mechanism of "genders" as we know them: the *nexus of
> biological & social reproduction* (the site of oppression to which Nestor
> rightly called attention), which in turn has a large impact on whether and
> how women can participate in the "public" sphere (paid employment,
> political organizing, etc.). In fact, how the line between the private &
> the public is politically drawn under capitalism in itself contributes to
> the making of "genders" and oppressions based upon them. Both feminists
> and Marxists have correctly called for the socialization of care-giving;
> and the issue remains important, especially in that neoliberal cutbacks of
> social programs have had and continue to have gender-disproportionate
> negative effects on women. For instance, in Japan, with radical aging of
> the population in the context of very inadequate old-age pensions, health
> care, etc., women have been compelled to take on more and more care-giving
> labor (taking care of the old, in addition to the sick, the disabled, the
> young), which has enabled capital to benefit from women's so-called
> "preference" for part-time labor ...
We need to include disability as critical theoretical category too. I recently discovered Nirvala Erevelles, a woman who like myself analyzes disability as a construct of the political economy. Erevelles discusses the politics of gendered "caring work" and its implications for the continued production of marginalized difference. She shows how disability can be re-understood as an ideological condition which is also structured by the same
exploitative material conditions of capitalism as is gender.
"The ideological category of disability is essential to the continued existence of the capitalist enterprise because it is able to regulate and control the unequal distribution of surplus through invoking biological difference as the "natural" cause of all inequality, thereby successfully justifying the social and economic inequality that maintains social hierarchies." Disability and the Dialectics of Difference, Disability & Society, Vol. 11, No. 4, 1996, pp 519-537
So that rather than viewing disability as a burden solely placed upon women who are segregated into care giving "professions" she shows how both women and
disabled people (constructed as unemployables) are devalued and oppressed under the same prevailing labor relationships of production.
She shows how rehabilitation is "a division of labor that produces subjects who are bound to live within boundaries that mark them as separate from those who are considered productive in the mainstream society." This is highly important because disabled people are not objects, they are equally oppressed by a system which isolates and confines them to inferior stagnant positions while the capitalists are exploiting bodies for their profits. -- Marta Russell