The global construction of gender : home-based work in the political economy of the 20th century
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The global construction of gender : home-based work in the political economy of the 20th century
Columbia University Press, c1999
- : cloth
- : pbk
Available at / 17 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [199]-224) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Gender constructions do not stop at state boundaries. Global understandings of masculinity and femininity can emerge out of the matrix of international politics. Proposing an innovative conception of global politics by de-emphasizing state actors and instead analyzing competing transnational discourses, The Global Construction of Gender focuses specifically on people who work at home for pay. Prugl explores the debates and rhetoric surrounding home-based workers that have taken place in global movements and multilateral organizations since the early 1900s in order to trace changing conceptions of gender over the course of this century. As Prugl relates, home-based workers, both urban and rural, engage in a broad array of activities: they "sew garments, embroider, make lace, roll cigarettes, weave carpets, peel shrimp, prepare food, polish plastic, process insurance claims, edit manuscripts, and assemble artificial flowers, umbrellas, and jewelry." These (mostly female) workers are widely recognized as underpaid and exploited.
In investigating their plight, Prugl describes the rules that have separated home and work and, in the process, created a diverse array of distinctly gendered identities, including that of the working mother as a social problem, the wage-earning worker as a male breadwinner, the crafts-producing woman as the symbol of Third World nationhood, the woman micro-entrepreneur as the heroine of structural adjustment, and the new androgynous home-based consultant/freelancer/teleworker as the exemplary worker of a flexibly organized global economy.
Table of Contents
1. Feminism, Constructivism, and the Global Politics of Home-Based Work 2. Motherly Women--Breadwinning Men: Industrial Homework and the Construction of Western Welfare States 3. Supplemental Earners and National Essence: Home-Based Crafts Producers and Nation-Building in Post-Colonial States 4. Marginal Survivors or Nurturant Entrepreneurs: Home-Based Work in the Informal Sector 5. Fordist Gender Rules at Issue: The Debate over the ILO Convention on Homework 6. Fordist Class Categories at Issue: Are Homeworkers Employees or Self-Employed? 7. Studying Global Politics Appendix: ILO Convention Concerning Home Work Notes Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
