Decolonizing Class: A Feminist Revision of Social Reproduction and Informal Labor

• In Event: 20881 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Labor in Global Perspective

Abstract

This paper responds to a tendency in labor studies to foreground the gender of women workers when examining their experiences in the labor process and workplace politics, while representing male workers as the normative (universal) worker subject who is unmarked by gender at work, yet axiomatic of working-class and trade union politics. This gendered dualism extends beyond a putative historical schism between masculinized formal sector work and feminized informal sector work as even informal male workers are accorded the status of ‘worker subjects’ in class-based politics and labor studies of the Global South. I theorize this analytic of working (class) ‘men without gender’ and ‘women without class’ as a feature of a postcolonial gendered labor system akin to the modern gender system theorized by decolonial scholar Maria Lugones (2007, 2010). Such masculinist standpoints persist in Indian neo-Marxist scholar Kalyan Sanyal’s (2007) much lauded and pathbreaking reformulation of informal labor as the ‘need economy’ in postcolonial capitalism, which, he argues, is neither a historical anomaly nor indicative of an incomplete transition to capitalism, but is instead constitutive of dependent, late-capitalist development in postcolonial economies. Despite this radical rethinking of informality, Sanyal nonetheless brackets unpaid domestic labor and care work from his reconceptualization of the informal sector. To undertake a feminist revision of Sanyal’s analysis, I extend Lugones’ rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity to the coloniality of class. I examine the narratives of married and single male workers, who comprise both Delhi-based and migrant workers from other regions, about their experiences of migration, work, domesticity, and displaced homemaking. Their stories about shared domestic labor with conjugal partners, and communally organized housework among homosocial cohabitants, illuminates the varied ways that social reproduction determines their paid factory work. This enables me to ask: What is hidden from our understanding of gendered informal labor in postcolonial contexts in the Global South and how this might push us further to decolonize class?

Author

• Jayati Lal, College of the Holy Cross