24 - Care and Social Reproduction

Summary

Introduction

I wrote the first draft of this chapter in the same that week the colonial (federal Canadian) government announced its first budget since the onset of the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in early 2020. Delivered by the first woman finance minister (and deputy prime minister), the budget was characterized by the government as ‘very much a feminist plan’ (Government of Canada, 2021). Two key foci were national investments in childcare and national standards for long-term care (institutional seniors’ care), both dimensions of the ‘crisis of care’ intensified (though by no means instigated) by the pandemic (The Economist, 2021).

These key policy commitments appeared to reverse decades of state-led divestment, marketization and (re)privatization of services to support care and social reproduction, researched and theorized by feminist scholars, including feminist economic and labour geographers (see, for example, Bakker and Silvey, 2008; Molinari and Pratt, 2021; Schwiter et al, 2018a). They were precipitated by evidence in Canada and elsewhere that the economic impacts of the pandemic are gendered, and that both unemployment and the increased burden of unpaid labour have been disproportionately borne by feminized workers – impacts that will not have surprised feminist scholars of structural adjustment or the 2008 global financial crisis and austerity regimes in Europe. Pandemic-related unemployment and impacts on livelihoods are also racialized and classed, shaped by White supremacy, colonialism and imperialism (Krupar and Sadural, 2022; Neely and Lopez, 2022).

The current pandemic moment thus represents an intensification of trends that feminist economic geographers have long signalled (Nagar et al, 2002; McDowell, 2003; Mullings, 2005; Pollard, 2013), and has pulled back the curtain on the household as a domain of paid and unpaid work invisibilized or ignored in economic research (Ruwanpura, 2013; Pimlott-Wilson, 2015; Worth, 2018). The economic geographies of our present conjuncture are highly uneven, seemingly unprecedented, yet rooted in historical socio-spatial structures, processes and institutions of production and reproduction that shape the landscapes of racialized global capitalism today. They spur us to examine how feminists have long signposted an agenda for economic geography that understands economic development and crisis in relation to these socio-spatial relations and their exclusions, and seeks to ground economic geography's future in a more inclusive and politicized vision of the economy and understanding of who counts within it.