Special Issue on Feminism and Capitalism

Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 479 7 preface 8 Why is feminism so good at understanding capitalism? Because gender, like capital, is never separate or pure in its expressions. Feminism has theorized gender as an intersecting system that configures and distributes power not just between female-identified and male-identified persons and within households, but also between classes and between producers and reproducers. It does so within and across these boundaries, and it questions the boundaries themselves. Always relational , feminism is adept at thinking about gender and capital as constitutive and in relation to difference—of sexuality and sex, race and caste, disability and debility, public and private, rural and urban, human and nonhuman animal, and Global North and Global South. Feminism is a critique of knowledge formations. This includes critiques of “classical ” Marxism and how capitalism is approached by the disciplines of history, economics, anthropology, geography, science, and by ethnic studies and area studies. Whether decolonial or postcolonial, anti-capitalist feminism challenges the telos of modernity by asking where women ’s liberation under capitalism dead-ends rather than progresses, and by questioning the Western-centrism of feminist knowledge production that does not scrutinize its own provenance. In its commitment to alternative worlds, feminism embraces humans, especially those gendered female, as embodied producers of situated knowledge, connected to kin and community, not the disembodied individual rationalists nor the “free” wage laborers capitalism depends on. Feminism is transdisciplinary in its choice of methodologies to apprehend capitalism. At times it is transnational, and at others, location-specific in tracing out the gendered workings of capital at multiple scales. Feminism is always auto-interrogatory, which makes it agile in its response to capitalism in its always restless and mutating forms. Special Issue on Feminism and Capitalism 480Preface Feminist activists and scholars theorize capitalism as a political and economic conjuncture, a hydra-headed monster configuring and distributing power unevenly across difference to produce multiple interrelated crises. Months prior to the COVID pandemic, when we issued the call for this special issue on feminism and capitalism, we indexed our contemporary conjuncture as one in which inequality is at an unconscionably high level. Hundreds of millions of people are poor, hungry, and in a perpetual search for bad jobs and precarious work. Sexual and domestic violence, and violence based on the hardening of gender, racial, caste, religious and ethnic differences is increasing. Migration and displacement within and across national boundaries are at record levels. An environmental apocalypse appears to be unfolding. The pandemic has exacerbated these crises and underscores the urgency of feminist interrogations of capitalism. Several works in this special issue focus on this very task, including Leslie Salzinger’s discussion of how capitalism is foundationally and structurally dependent on social reproduction, and Rebecca Herzig and Banu Subramaniam’s examination of “housekeeping ,” the “invisibilized, undercompensated, and utterly indispensable labor” of social reproduction in US universities, both of which have been intensified by the pandemic whose burdens have fallen in disproportionately gendered and racialized ways. Ana Hernández’s reflection on contemporary socialist feminist activism in Venezuela similarly points to how COVID has worsened longstanding capitalist, imperialist, and patriarchal processes, including increasing domestic violence and further restricting poor and working-class women’s access to food, medicine , and reproductive health. Sushmita Chatterjee and Kiran Asher’s essay extends our focus from humanist conceptions of labor and history in their examination of “COVID capitalism,” drawing our attention to the deep dependencies of human-animal relationships in the production of value. While examining the intersection of capitalism and the pandemic is one way of traversing this issue, there are other paths to take. We invite you to find your own, and in what follows, we suggest a few possibilities. Feminist activists and scholars, long dissatisfied with abstract generalizations about value-making in the realm of production and market exchange in capitalism, have sought to show its constitutive dependence on what it casts as outside: the gender-differentiated creation of life and labor. This, the realm of social reproduction, has witnessed a Preface 481 resurgence in feminist scholarship and movements in recent years. A cluster of essays provides a genealogy of feminist engagements...