Gender and economic activism in the diverse economy

Abstract

This thesis examines three cases of activism around gender and work inequality in contemporary Australia. Gendered economic inequality remains ubiquitous, despite decades of work from feminists and leftists to address it. This thesis suggests that while feminist theorists have successfully deconstructed gender and sex, when these same feminists look for a transformative politics of economy, they have little to offer beyond a discredited model of socialism. A transformative politics of gender and economy is deeply needed and we can look to fruitful practices and identifications in already existing feminist work activism for leads. In this thesis I draw together two previously separate areas of feminist theory - Nancy Fraser's political theory and J.K. Gibson-Graham's economic theory. I reinvigorate Fraser's conception of left movements for redistribution and recognition, and join her in her call for a transformative politics of gender and economy rather than action that affirms gender roles and welfare state responses to inequality. I argue for a genuinely deconstructed and transformed notion of diverse economies, as a way forward to transform gender and economic inequality. Gibson-Graham's reading of economies as diverse opens up multiple possibilities for reperforming the kinds of economies "" labour, transactions and enterprises - that facilitate surviving well, and helps move away from an unwitting capitalocentrism in left feminist activism. This argument is developed through analysis of three cases of economic activism in which I undertook participant observation: the Australian Services Union equal pay campaign for community workers, Asian Women at Work, a community organisation in the multicultural, low socio-economic area of Western Sydney, and Fitted for Work, an organisation seeking to fund its support of unemployed women through social enterprise. I show how activists in these cases of feminist work activism understand economy and economic inequality, and how they view their economic identities, practices and activism. My observations, interviews, and discourse analysis show that the attachment to worker and other politicised identities often prevents exploration of fertile opportunities for economic change, and may even assist to maintain capitalist dominance, but that there are other practices and non-capitalist identifications already existing in feminist work activism in Sydney that could be built upon. This thesis argues for an everyday language of economic wellbeing that is largely missing from the left feminist movements looked at in this research. It opens up important opportunities for increasing the effectiveness of feminist activism and critiques of work that address themselves to the deeply entrenched problems of gender and economic inequality.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English