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Reproducing Inequality: Cooking, Cleaning, and Caring in the Austerity Age

Swenson, Haley S
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468929824

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
This dissertation considers the experiences of unemployed people with unpaid labor in and around their homes in the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008. Unemployed people perform increased amounts of cooking, cleaning, and caring labor for themselves, for their families, and for others. The experience of these practices differs for participants with different intersecting class, gender, racial identities, and different physical locations in and surrounding the Midwestern city of Columbus, Ohio, which has recently earned a reputation as a city with immense opportunities due to its engagement in race-to-the-bottom economic incentives for employers. Comparing participants’ discussions of their increased role in unpaid labor reveals that the experience is an overall positive and empowering one for participants, while it contributes to the further limitation of opportunities at job and financial advancement and personal and familial well-being. The dissertation argues that these labors not only constitute critical, unrecognized contributions to the reproduction of the current austere, neoliberal economy, but also that the effects of these labors on the individuals performing them, and the stories they tell about this performance, reproduce the inequalities that put them on different trajectories from the outset. These labors produce, reproduce, and deepen existing material and ideological inequalities in and across the working and not-working classes, particularly through the different effects of this work on participants’ relationships to time, place, and others. The dissertation concludes with proposals for strategies which could reduce the inequality-producing effects of unpaid labor during unemployment and proposes a social-reproduction political framework for resisting the current austerity-entrenched political discourse.
Mytheli Sreenivas (Advisor)
207 p.
Gender; Gender Studies; Sociology; Womens Studies
Housework; gender; recession; Great Recession; austerity; neoliberalism; unpaid work; social reproduction; race; class; capitalism; inequality; care work

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Swenson, H. S. (2016). Reproducing Inequality: Cooking, Cleaning, and Caring in the Austerity Age [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468929824

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Swenson, Haley. Reproducing Inequality: Cooking, Cleaning, and Caring in the Austerity Age. 2016. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468929824.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Swenson, Haley. "Reproducing Inequality: Cooking, Cleaning, and Caring in the Austerity Age." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1468929824

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1468929824
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© 2016, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Reproducing Inequality: Cooking, Cleaning, and Caring in the Austerity Age by Haley S Swenson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.