Punjabi "housewives" in central Italy
Navigating Patriarchy, Labor Exploitation, and Welfare Exclusion
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2056867 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Annamaria Laudini (European University Institute, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 345-365 |
| Publication date | 2024-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Dialectical Anthropology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0304-4092 • E-ISSN: 1573-0786 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s10624-024-09735-x |
| OpenAlex | W4401844331 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 33 |
Who benefits from the exploitation of women's work, and how? Marxist feminists in the 1970s-1980s and recently theorists of Social Reproduction argued that women's work is exploited twice, or "super-exploited," by capital and patriarchy. Such "super-exploitation" is sustained by the process of "housewifization," which legitimizes the extraction and accumulation of surplus value from the social reproductive work of women. The housewife ideology not only mystifies social reproductive work as natural - thereby legitimizing it as free - but also frames women's productive work as marginal - thereby legitimizing it as cheaper and more precarious. Building on Maria Mies' (1981) famous study of women lacemakers in India, where the devaluation of women's work is shown to serve both capital and patriarchy, I analyze the experiences of Punjabi "housewives" in central Italy, exploring them through the lens of one family and specifically its youngest and eldest daughters, whom I interviewed during ethnographic fieldwork. I show how, despite the essential role played by these women in their family mobility project, the housewife ideology - together with other patriarchal constructs of honor and caste endogamy - obscures the value of their social reproductive and productive work and imposes a number of restrictions on their freedom. I find, further, that their super-exploitation is aggravated in the context of migration: the labor exploitation and welfare exclusion that they face in Italy due to the country's exclusionary immigration regime and unregulated capitalist market complicate their chances to challenge the oppressive relations they are involved in
Caste · Context (archaeology · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Housewife · Ideology · Patriarchy · Political science · Politics · Social capital · Social exclusion · Social reproduction · Social science · Sociology · Feminism, Gender, and Intersectionality · Gender Studies · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Refugees, and Integration
The Violence of the Green Revolution
Social Reproduction Theory
Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale
Marxism and the Oppression of Women
Indian immigration to Italy
Punjabi irregular immigration to Italy and Spain
Assessing temporary foreign worker programs through the prism of Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program
Intersectionality and Social-Reproduction Feminisms
Migration or immigration? Commentary on Leigh Binford’s article
Communalism and the Green Revolution in Punjab
A Value Theory of Inclusion
Religious Conversion and Dalit Assertion among a Punjabi Dalit Diaspora
Dalits Cultural Spaces and Contested Culture in Punjab
Caste Hierarchy, Dominance, and Change in Punjab
Retro-modern India
The North–South Myth Revised
The genealogy of a dalit faith
The Bourgeois Woman and the Half-Naked One
Unfree relations and the feminisation of agricultural labour in Andhra Pradesh, 1970-95
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |