Symbolic Sexuality and Economic Work in Dominica, West Indies: The Naturalization of Sex and Women's Work in Development

Bill Maurer
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Bill Maurer: Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305

Review of Radical Political Economics, 1991, vol. 23, issue 3-4, 1-19

Abstract: In this essay, I draw from a specific ethnographic example to elucidate the connections among gender, sexuality and work, and to argue for a method of analysis encompassing both the symbolic and the economic. Such an analysis requires the problematization of the distinction between sex as "natural" and gender as "cultural" in much feminist thought, and of the public/domestic dichotomy as it has been used to explain women's oppression. Symbolic meanings embodied in sexuality cannot be reduced to the gendered economics of production and reproduction, yet neither can production and reproduction be explained away or ignored completely by a symbolic approach. In the Commonwealth of Dominica in the West Indies, men's work and sexuality are linguistically marked and conceptualized as highly differentiated. Women's sexuality and work, on the other hand, are unmarked and undervalued. Parallel meanings are attached to work and to sexuality, and these parallel meanings inform an economic and symbolic system in which women's power over their own bodies and economies is undermined.

Date: 1991
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