Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—The Lives of Others: Body Work, the Production of Difference, and Labor Geographies

Linda McDowell

Economic Geography, 2015, vol. 91, issue 1, 1-23

Abstract: In this article I address one of the key aspects of feminist arguments about the economy—that is claims about domestic and caring labor and its necessity for capitalism. I address who undertakes caring labor, in what social relations, and in which spaces in Western economies, where deindustrialization and the rise of service-dominated employment have been associated with a transformation in the nature of work and the composition of the workforce. I review the ways in which this contemporary economic and employment change has been theorized by economic sociologists and economic geographers, in particular by labor geographers—that part of the discipline to which I feel the greatest connection—suggesting that changes in what is often termed reproductive labor have been relatively neglected at the expense of a focus on immaterial, high-status employment in knowledge-based economies. Through a historical example, I then illustrate the production of difference between women workers in caring jobs in the United Kingdom, arguing that closer attention to the intersection of embodied social attributes adds to explanations of continuity and change in the labor market as well as revealing a legacy of discrimination.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ecge.12070 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ecgeog:v:91:y:2015:i:1:p:1-23

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0095

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Geography is currently edited by Yuko Aoyama, Amy Glasmeier, Gernot Grabher and Henry Wai-chung Yeung

More articles in Economic Geography from Clark University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().