Domestic LaborPapers

Anna Moser places Wages for Housework and the contemporary self-care industry in one political-economic history, showing how capitalism privatizes reproduction and resells individual solutions.

Hochschild explains global care chains through the story of a Filipina migrant nanny: wealthy countries receive care while sending communities absorb care drain and emotional displacement.

Pyle analyzes the growth of transnational care work through globalization and social reproduction, showing how nursing, domestic work, intimate labor, and migration regimes form part of the global economy rather than private arrangements outside it.

Parreñas's classic article makes global care chains concrete through migrant Filipina domestic workers, showing how care crises in middle-class households are displaced onto women from the Global South while creating new care gaps in sending communities.

This foundational chapter develops the concept of the feminist standpoint by integrating Marxist theory with feminist epistemology. Hartsock argues that women's experiences - particularly in domestic labor and social reproduction - offer a privileged epistemic position from which to critique dominant knowledge systems and capitalist structures.