Clothing matters: locating wash, wear, and care

Abstract

Clothes and laundry are simultaneously profoundly personal and political. In this article, we illustrate how our book, Wash, Wear and Care: Clothing and Laundry in Long-Term Residential Care, applies feminist political economy to reveal the importance to workers, residents, families, and volunteers of the invisible and undervalued work involved in clothes and laundry. In the process, we illuminate how effective feminist political economy theory and methods can be in exposing the personal as political and in linking the global to the national as well as to the very local and indeed intimate in these days of the international power of capital.

Keywords:

• Care work
• clothing
• feminist political economy
• laundry
• long-term care

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Armstrong and Day, Wash, Wear and Care.

2 We would like to thank Susan Spronk and Emily Regan Wills for the insightful reviews and suggestions.

3 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays.

4 Mahon and Robinson, Feminist Ethics and Social Policy.

5 Armstrong and Lowndes, Creative Team Work.

6 Smith, Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People.

7 Andrew et al., Studies in Political Economy: Developments in Feminism; Armstrong and Connelly, Feminism, Political Economy and the State; Connelly and Armstrong, Feminism in Action.

8 Armstrong and Armstrong, The Privatisation of Care; Armstrong and Armstrong, “Beyond Sexless Class and Classless Sex.”

9 Jenson and Saint-Martin, “New Routes to Social Cohesion?”

10 Benson, “The Political Economy of Women’s Liberation.”

11 For example, see Bhattacharya, “Margaret Benston and the Liberation of Women from ‘Political Economy’”; Federici, “On Margaret Benston.”

12 Gimenez, “Women, Class, and Identity Politics,” 27.

13 Armstrong, “Restructuring Public and Private.”

14 ILO and OECD, “New Job Opportunities in an Ageing Society,” 8.

15 Hochschild, “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value.”

16 Storm, Braedley, and Chivers, “Gender Regimes in Ontario Nursing Homes”; Storm, “Care Work in a Swedish Nursing Home.”

17 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.

18 Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.

19 See Table 2 in Harrington et al., “Marketization in Long-Term Care.”

20 Ryan and Young, “Social Impact Bonds.”

21 Panitch and Konings, “Myths of Neoliberal Deregulation.”

22 Armstrong and Armstrong, The Privatisation of Care.

23 Macarov, What the Market Does to People, 71.

24 Baines, “Caring for Nothing.”

25 Romanow, Building on Values.

26 Armstrong, Armstrong, and Scott-Dixon, Critical to Care: The Invisible Women in Health Services.

27 Daly, “Dancing the Two-Step in Ontario’s Long-Term Care Sector: Deterrence Regulation = Consolidation.”

28 Armstrong and Armstrong, The Privatisation of Care.

29 Armstrong, Armstrong, and Messing, “Gendering Work? Women and Technologies in Health Care;” Day, “The Implications of Conceptualising Care.”

30 Lanoix, “Triangulating Care.”

31 Ungerson, “Cash in Care.”

32 Daly and Lewis, “The Concept of Social Care.”

33 Müller, “The Careless Society.”

34 Müller, “The Careless Society.”

35 Buse and Twigg, “Clothing, Embodied Identity, and Dementia.”

36 Kontos, “Ethnographic Reflections on Selfhood, Embodiment and Alzheimer’s Disease.”

37 Harnett, “Seeking Exemptions from Nursing Home Routines.”

38 Entwistle, “The Dressed Body.”

39 Twigg, “Clothing and Dementia: A Neglected Dimension?” 228.

40 Carroll, Corporate Power in a Globalising World.

41 Roumpakis and Papadopoulos, “From Social Regulation of Competition to Competition as Social Regulation.”

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as part of their Major Collaborative Research Initiative (Pat Armstrong, York University, Principal Investigator [file#412-2010-1004]). The research remains the responsibility of the authors.

Notes on contributors

Pat Armstrong

Pat Armstrong is a Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Suzanne Day

Suzanne Day is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.