‘Intimacy, informalization and intersecting inequalities: tracing the linkages’

ABSTRACT

This essay traces linkages among the intimacy of familial household relations, the informalization and market dynamics of capitalist economies, and the intersection of multiple inequalities within and between state/nations. I also explore how informality is not only gendered but inextricably racialized. The latter is rarely addressed, much less integrated, in conventional accounts of informality. Yet it is a particularly urgent consideration in the context of today’s between- and within-nation inequalities and their corollary harms, resentments, violence and conflicts. I begin by clarifying the thematic foci of intimacy, informality and intersectionality, and why I foreground them in this essay. I turn next to why state/nations are central features in my account, beginning not in the modern era but millennia ago with the earliest known ‘archaic‘ states and their unprecedented regulation of sexual/familial, ’economic’ (property) and membership arrangements. Next follows a discussion of state/nation formation in the tumultuous transition to European modernity and its emerging liberal, capitalist, imperialist and racializing projects. I then review neoliberal economic developments and current conditions of informality, which includes a survey of liberal, marxist and feminist analyses and their policy recommendations. A concluding section draws together key arguments and their implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Informal economy
• racialization
• intersectionality
• state and nation formation
• familial/sexual relations and households

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See inter alia Berlant 1998; Bedford 2008; Ballantyne and Burton 2009; Oswin and Olund 2010; ISR 2014; Jonasdottir and Ferguson 2014; Pain and Staeheli 2014. In recent work I advocate queering the family and the ‘globally intimate’ (Peterson 2014b, 2017), and the present essay draws from my on-going research critically investigating state-sanctioned marriage as a cornerstone of regulatory practices shaping intimate and international inequalities.

2. In recent centuries, most people/nations have been incorporated into a world system structured by capitalist economic relations and accumulation dynamics that presume heteropatriarchal transmission – via familial inheritance – of property, as well as a state/nation-based system that presumes birthright determination of citizenship (being born on a nation’s soil or of a citizen parent) and the rights, benefits and migration options that particular citizenship claims afford (Stevens 1999; Brubaker 2015).

3. I understand ‘feminization’ as effectuating the devalorization of ideas, identities, bodies, practices, skills, etc., associated with ‘the feminine’/femininity (not all women or only women). This devalorization is both ideational and material, as exemplified in the typically lower status of and compensation for labour characterized as ‘women’s work,’ whether or not it is done by females. Devalorized femininity is the corollary of privileging or ‘over-valuing’ that which is associated with (especially, hegemonic) masculinity (not all men or only men). For theoretical elaboration of this claim and its wider application see Peterson 2003, 2012; Barker and Feiner 2010.

4. Intersectionality signifies ‘the complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation – economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential – intersect in historically specific contexts’ (Brah and Phoenix 2004, 76); also Hancock 2007; Peterson 2009. Importantly introduced by black feminist scholars (Crenshaw 1991), intersectionality has been taken up in varying ways and currently features in feminist debates (Puar 2012; Bilge 2013; Signs 2013; Hochreiter 2014).

5. James Scott’s very recent Against the Grain (2017) locates domestication several millennia prior to definitive state formations.

6. See inter alia Mosse 1985; Parker et al. 1991; Stoler 1995; McClintock 1995; McClintock et al. 1997; Stevens 1999; Levine 2004.

7. For more developed argumentation and extensive references, see Peterson 2010a, 2012.

8. By emphasizing the vulnerability of workers, my critical account problematically omits their agency and resistance activities (but see Hawkesworth 2006; Peterson and Runyan 2010).

9. While recognizing the problematic nature of data on informality, generalizations presented here are widely accepted (for example Carr, Chen, and Tate 2000; ILO 2002a; Chant and Pedwell 2008).

10. See Peterson 2003; also Benería 2003; Chant and Pedwell 2008; Berik et al. 2009.

11. Income-generating work for women has long been crucial to all but elite and middle-class households, and definitively so in female-headed households. The latter are increasing worldwide and in some countries constitute a significant 30% of households (Chant 2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

V. Spike Peterson

V. Spike Peterson is Professor of International Relations at the University of Arizona, with courtesy appointments in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Institute for LGBT Studies and International Studies. Her book, A Critical Rewriting of Global Political Economy: Integrating Reproductive, Productive and Virtual Economies (2003) introduced an alternative analytics for examining intersections of race, class, sex/gender and national hierarchies in the context of neoliberal globalization. She also co-authored, with Anne Sisson Runyan, Global Gender Issues in the New Millennium (2010). Her current research features critical analyses of racialization, informalization, global householding, and global insecurities, as well as long histories and current critical queering of marriage, citizenship and states/nations.