The logic of gender: on the separation of spheres and the process of abjection
Marxist-feminists have employed a number of binary oppositions: productive/reproductive, paid/unpaid and public/private. We interrogate these categories and propose new ones. Starting from the specificities of the production and reproduction of labour-power, we define gender as the anchoring of individuals into two separate spheres of social reproduction. We trace the development of these spheres through the history…
I really enjoyed this article and I'm looking forward to the follow up, I guess it shouldn't surprise me since my disability got to the point where I had to stop working full time and saw my income sliced in half (ouch) but I'd not really joined the dots and I wasn't aware of the extent of the pay gap for disabled people and disabled women in general. The stuff about domestic violence services is shocking, and of course I imagine the majority of what drives that is lack of funding but fucking hell how depressing.
Also, Zedkat - I struggled to find a picture to illustrate this so if the main picture is not to your liking, let me know and I'll change it. To...I dunno :/
Really interesting article - especially for me, as a disabled woman. I would be interested to know the figures comparing abuse towards disabled and non-disabled men. Are they also twice as likely to suffer domestic abuse? I would suspect that to be so, if not even higher.
Thanks for posting this.
The picture is ace - was just thinking how apt it is :)
There's a lot I want so about this article, but haven't got time now but just wondered say thanks for writing/posting it, it's really good and will comment more later!
Lot's of numbers to get my head round: will have to read it through a couple more times, but just wanted to join the others in saying this is a really useful article.
So yeah now I've got a bit more time this is a good article, and I'm grateful to the author.
As a disabled male worker, this is a subject close to my heart. At the council where I work I try to raise issues related to disability as much as possible.
In fact, probably the majority of the individual cases where I represent people (as a union rep) are disabled women (well to be more specific they are mostly BME disabled women). In fact one of my members has just been fired in a way which I think is directly discriminatory both on the grounds of disability and gender.
Mostly, they are subjected to underperformance procedures or sickness absence management procedures, which can both end up ultimately with dismissal.
Furthermore, in the recent rounds of cuts, disabled workers have been twice as likely to be made redundant as non-disabled workers. (That said, I have been unable to determine if this is because of discrimination, or the fact that more older workers take voluntary redundancy, and more older workers are more likely to be disabled.)
With the pay gap, I can totally see how this could arise. I know personally, I'm too afraid to apply for other jobs, as I'm worried that when employers realise I'm disabled (my disability is invisible) and realise they have to make adjustments which may cause them some hassle, they will just get rid of me early on before I have proper employment rights protections. I know that many of my disabled colleagues feel the same way. So this keeps you in lower-wage jobs, as it only leaves internal promotions available to you. Which can be few and far between, and in these you can be subjected to more direct discrimination as they are aware of your disability already. Of course you will also be less likely to get promoted if you have ever stood up for your rights or come into conflict with management which disabled employees do more often, both in those procedures above and also in requesting reasonable adjustments.
In terms of why the stuff you are talking about isn't written about more. Well, in a way I can understand that.
As part of my union role I do a lot of work requesting information from management/making freedom of information requests etc, which I then analyse for equalities data. To try to identify patterns of discrimination etc.
Now, a big problem with it is say I have a set of data which I want to look at with regard to your main primary equalities criteria which would be:
- gender (at least two variables)
- ethnicity (at least eight variables)
- age (usually six age brackets or more)
- disability (two or more variables - if you want to distinguish between mental and physical disabilities, say)
So, altogether it is a lot of stuff to compare. That's at least 18 variables. Which is doable of course.
But if you start trying to combine different areas of discrimination, then it hugely increases the amount of data crunching you need to do.
Because if you look at almost any area like pay, when you combine two or more sets of oppressed characteristics, you will see the level of oppression increase (i.e. black women are paid less than white women and black men etc).
So if you want to look at each set of two oppressed characteristics and compare them, then you just have to do exponentially more processing. So instead of comparing 18 variables, you are actually comparing 18 x 18 = 324 variables (if my maths is right; if it's not then it's still a large number). And this just isn't feasible most of the time.
That said, this isn't an excuse for ignoring the experiences of disabled women, at all. And I think it's very important for us to keep emphasising pointing out discrimination in all areas of life, including compound discriminations. And any movement like feminism or disability rights should take into account all of the intersecting oppressions within each group.