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Gender as a Category of Analysis, Gender isn't just about women's…

- - - - Boundary-setting = Power
        
        Nested Privates (households, second economy) can exist inside publics (state, firms) and vice versa
        
        Notion of nested public/private spheres (private buisnesses inside public institutions, private care sustaining public employment) helps illuminate how global care cahins nest private households inside global labour markets
    - - Public/Private = Discursive + Fractal
  - - - But they were characterised by "shortages, inefficiencies, coercion and hidden inequalities"
        
        Welfare retrenchment -> women as saftey net
        
        As states step back, women's empowerment language is used to normalise the transfer of risk to households.
    - - This quasi-welfare form makes it easier for neoliberal narratives to later paint welfare as failed and individual/family responsibility as modern - even though women's unpaid labour had always underpinned socialist provision
  - - - Elite men = providers
        Wives = status symbols
      - Re-familialisation of care
  - - - categories like "mother," "worker," "Roma," "unemployed" shape who gets what and with how much stigma
        
        e.g: Parental leave debates in Hungary explicitly distinguished respectable Hungarian mothers from "suspect" poor/Roma mothers
        
        There is also a discursive element to the cover stories
      - all 4 elements are discursive: gender is made through symbols, norms, insititutional classifications and identity stories, not simply discovered bodies
      - the way language, symbols, norms, insititutions and subjectivities produce gendered meanings, rather than simply reflecting pre-given differences
  - - - Zaharijevic 2025: The shift to capitalism dismantled state-provided childcare and job security, disproportionately imapcting women and making the "Feminisation of Poverty" a key issue in Eastern Europe
    - - multi-dependence -> protection fantasy
- - - - Treating gender as something factories do shows how they actively produce "cheap feminised labour by framing women as naturally suited to tedious secondary income jobs rather than simply reflecting pre-existing labour supply
        
        Productive femininity trope (Salzinger 2004 p. 46-56)
        
        The Barbadian "higgler" + informatics worker who show that "local traders are consitituting global capitalism, not just passively affected by it (Freeman p.1011)
        
        Demonstrate that 'local' women's labour is central to global capitalism, prefiguring Solari & Radhakrishnan's (2023) migrant carers and entrepreneurial women as key makers of neoliberal order not just its victims
        
        women are constructed as docile, dexterous, naturally good at repetitive work and secondary earners, supporting their "cheapness"
        
        management expects "docile girls"; factories frame jobs as naturally feminine
        
        when men enter these jobs, the jobs stay symbollically feminine
        
        gender is a cultural schema rather than a simple refelction of who works here
        
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        Salzinger (2004) illustrates how gendered workplace discourse constructs women as cheap, flexible labour that later underpins the development narratives that recast similar traits as reasons to invest in and empower women
        
        Shows that cheapness is made, not found by repeatedly framing women as secondary earners, nimble fingered, patient and compliant, management justifies low wages and high turnover even when men also take these jobs
  - - - Four elements of gender: (Scott 1986 p. 1067-1069)
        
        Symbols/ cultrual representations
        
        Biblical figures (Eve/Mary)
        
        Images of purity/pollution
        
        "Marie Antionette's feminine vulnerabilities vs. Furies of hell in the abused shape of the vilest women"
        
        Political legitimacy is narrated through femininity and monstrosity
        
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        Symbols are multiple and contradictory, they anchor power struggles and demonstrate hwo legitimacy and cirsis are narrated through feminised figures
        
        Solari & Radhakrishnan's 'good vs bad women' update these symbolic oppositions: patriotic mothers vs feminists, proper wives vs 'degenerate' queer/sex worker figures
        
        Scott emphasises these symbols are multiple and contradictory, not a single fixed image
        
        Protectory imagery (strong father, vulnerable women, feminised enemies like 'Gayropa) are gendered symbols that soctt says organise political meaning.
        
        Normative concepts/ doctorines
        
        Religion, law, science define man/ woman as seperate hierarchical, natural
        
        Norms in relgion, law, science ('Woman as naturally caring,' 'man as rational head of household') are discursive rules that define proper masculinity/femininity; they appear timeless but Scott stresses they alwasy supress alternatives
        
        Breadwinner doctorine and neoliberal choice narratives suppress other ways of organising work and care
        
        Scott's point is that these appear timeless but always suppress alternatives
        
        Social Institutions/ organisations
        
        Kinship, family, labour markets, education, state
        
        The nation state itself becomes the key gendered institution enacting protector masculinity as a part of Public sphere. Whereby contemporary states actively construct themselves as masculine protectors through policy, law and military display
        
        The nation state positions itself as the ultimate public protector of the private family/nation creating a nested structure where private households (feminised, vulnerable) exist inside the public state (masculinised, authoritative)
        
        Scott criticises reducing gender to kinship alone
        
        Subjectivities
        
        How people come to feel themselves as men/women/other
        
        not timeless psychology but historically produced
        
        historically produced: people feel themselves to be men/women/others through the symbols, norms and institutions that surround them
        
        Gal &Kligman's 'brave victim woman' and 'big child man' or Solari & Radhakrishnan's 'empowered woman' and 'anxious men' are concrete examples of such historically specific gendered selves
    - - Gender = constitutive + power signifier
      - Man and Woman as "Empty and Overflowing" (Scott 1986 p.1074)
        
        empty = no ultimate, transcendent meaning
        
        Helps explain why the same categories ('mother', 'worker', 'empowered woman') can present themselves as common sense rather than idological projects
        
        overflowing = even when they look fixed, they contain denied/alternative meanings
        
        Means they have no fixed essence but can hold many even conflicting meanings
        
        This explains how the same categories can organise bourgeois seperate spheres, socialist worker-mother ideals, postsocialist brave victim identities and neoliberal empowered woman/protector man without ever losing thei apparent naturalness
  - - - Masculine
        
        Global
        
        Theoretical
        
        Productive
      - Feminine
        
        Consumptive
        
        Local
        
        Ethnographic
      - By mapping these concepts as masculine and feminine, these binaries reproduce the very hierarchy Scott wants to historicise
        
        Regendering and Rescale globalisation so that gender and local practices are seen as contitutive of the global not marginal to it
        
        Technologies of othering (Solari & Radhakrishnan p.128)
        
        Misogyny
        
        concrete mechanisms through which gendered and sexual differences are used to signify who belongs and who does not = gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power
        
        Homophobia
        
        These mappings both erase gender from macro analysis (globalisation appears gender neutral) and traps gender in micro case studies of poor women on local scale
- - - - The local is not just feminised/lower it is where global processes are actually made
  - - - Gal and Kilman: bread winner ideal reintroduced and recontextualised in post soviet nations
    - - Freeman collapses this binary by showing "higgling" tied to wage work, and consumption practices as productive of global circuits
    - - Migration as a path to modernity/globalistaion
  - - - factories "do" gender by recruiting women as docile, nimble secondary earners
    - - Cheapness is produced by ideology and practice, not pregiven by markets
    - - Gal & Kligman's second economy and women's multi-job stratergies under post socialism tie to Salzinger's maquiladora workers and Solari & Radhakrishnan's migrant domestic workers, shwoing a shared repertoire of feminised felxibility marketed as modernity
  - - - translates global status competition into gendered terms
        
        which nations look 'strong', virile, traditional yet modern depends on its gender order
        
        protector leaders
        
        decent families
        
        'proper women
        
        Global competition as gendered
        
        Freeman shows macro globalisation is imagined as neutral, yet implicitly masculine; Solari & Radhakrishnan make this explicit by showing how states compete over manly strength vs feminised decadence
        
        Feminised work -> protector masculinity
        
        As global production relies on feminised, cheap labour (maquilas, care work, informal trading) men who are displaced from these roles turn to protectionism and nationalism as alternative sources of status
      - Global feminised labour = multi-job stratergies in postsocialist nations and second economy patterns
        
        when women take on multi-job stratergies and migrate into global circuits, their earnings and mobility can undermine mens breadwinner authority; the protector cover story offers an ttractive new role to these ansxious men
- - - - The flexible professional who "has it all" and the Third World woman entrepreneur as icons of neoliberal modernity
        
        These women are framed as evidence that "markets and meritocracy are fair and gender-equal if only individuals work hard and make the right choices
        
        Freeman's critique that globalisation theory masculinises the global and feminises the local is reworked here: empowered women are precisely the figures theough which the global is now feminised
        
        The empowered woman is global, cosmopolitan, mobile and thus embodies what Freeman calls the "global" side of the binary while still drawing on feminised images of care and rationality
        
        "Productive Femininity" underlies the empowered woman's ability to work flexibly and cheaply
        
        The trope that women are adaptable, multi-tasking and emotionally literate is repackaged as a virtue of empowered subjcets rather than a jsutification for their exploitation (Salzinger)
      - Empowerment becomes a language for selling deregulation, welfare retrenchment, and financialisation as progress for women
        
        Empowered women are used to brand nations as modern competitive and morally superior
        
        These women become symbols that anchor neoliberal narratives of meritocracy, in the same way that Marie Antoinette or the feminine nation anchored earlier political discourses.
        
        Scott points out that gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power
        
        Helps us see that empowered femininity is not just about women; it's a way of legitimising neoliberal power and rewriting histories of inequality as individual failure or success
        
        The empowered woman ideal takes this shift and frames it as liberation and choice, masking what they call "multi-dependency stratergies" as self reliant entrepreneurship rather than survival tactics
        
        Gal & Kligman's analysis of postsocialist welfare and family policy shows how states retreat from universal provisioning and push responsibility back into families, especially onto women
  - - - Women are targeted with microcredit, conditional cash transfers and entreprenurship programs that make them ideal debtors: responsible, disciplined and morally accountable for managing household risk
        
        women = moral stewards of family welfare
      - Under socialism and postsocialism, benefits tied to employment and motherhood, women became dependent on the state as workers and mothers. (Gal & Kligman)
        
        In neoliberal schemes that dependence reappears as dependence on financial markets and NGOs
        
        Concept of multi-dependency (on state, spouse markets) is transformed into a celebrated multi-tasking ability: the same juggling act that was once a survival strategy becomes the basis for portraying women as natural risk managers and credit subjects
      - Freeman's higglers and informatics workers already combine wage work, informal trade and family obligations which is the type of flexible entrepreneurial subject celebrated by microfinance donors
        
        Salzinger's factory women are paid as if they are secondary earners in development discourse, that secondary status is glossed as opportunity for empowerment via small loans and side businesses.
  - - - 1. Reproduce and care for families
      - 2. Earn income through wage work or entrepreneurship
        
        Sold as empowerment (women are "leaders", "entrepreneurs," "change agents") but in practice intensifies women's double burden, now upgraded to a triple burden under finacialised regimes.
        
        Under socialism women became a "numerically important presence in the public" but "retained almost sole responsibility for household work and childrearing."
        
        That double burden becomes the template on which neoliberal programs build:they add financialised responsibilities on top, turning women into household CFOs
        
        Notion of "stratified motherhood" (Gal & Kligman) also appears in who is framed as successfully managing this triple role vs who is surveilled and stigmatised for failing (middle class vs poor/Roma mothers)
        
        white, middle class women who embody national modernity (heteronationalism) versus poor, migrant Roma women who are policed, surveilled or rendered the servants of empowerment
        
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        Women combining informatics work with higgling shows the material reality behind the triple role. Women knit together multiple income sources and consumption practices to keep household afloat, which can be rebranded as "entrepreneurial empowerment" (Freeman)
        
        Similar to the migrating women in Neoliberal order that were seen as serving their country whilst elaving their families behind
        
        "brave victim woman" under socialism (Gal & Kligman)
        
        At the same time, in sending countries (Philippines, Ukraine, Moldova, India) women who migrate as earners destabilise local gender hierarchies: men lose symbolic authority as breadwinners, which feeds anxieties that later show up in protector masculinities
        
        Women's rise -> Male anxiety Makes visible how the celebration of empowered women is a key backdrop to the shift from provider to protector roles for men
        
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        Scott's focus on subjectivity helps us see that these women are not forced into roles; they may also derive dignity, pride and new sense of self from meeting impossible demands
      - 3. Manage credit, debt and savings to secure household survival and supposedly national development
  - - - Local actors constitute global care chains, not just victims (Freeman). Their labour allows elite women to embody the ideal of empowerment while offloading their own reproductive labour
        
        The same gendered logics that make women "cheap flexible labour" also make others idealised entrepreneurial subjects
      - Compatible with the trope of productive femininity (Salzinger) (migrant women = naturally suited to detious emotional, or caring work) justifying low wages and precarious conditions of these care workers
        
        The same discursive tools that make maquila work "feminine" and cheap are used to naturalise migrant women's work in homes and hospitals.
      - Postsocialist women's stratergied of combining low-paid public jobs with private informal work resemble the transnational care chains (Gal & Kligman)