ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

To examine the structure of experience faced by caregiving women in neoliberal society, this article proposes the ‘care crisis scenario diagram’ to theorize the tensional lives of women as historical caregivers, and offers thought experiments across six categories. Drawing on Capitalist-Social Reproduction Theory (C-SRT), this study defines capitalism in terms of its structural inequality, and employs a Marxist cultural studies approach to trace the intersectional collisions between the economic and the cultural. Capitalism has historically imposed a ‘care penalty’ on caregivers by appropriating reproduction/care labor without economic compensation, complemented by ‘housewifization’ at the cultural and ideological level. Under neoliberalism, this historical trajectory has evoloved. Culturally, the norm of female caregiving is imbricated with the neoliberal cultural norms that downplay altruism and caregiving practices. Economically, while social reproduction/care labor remain undervalued, women increasingly enter the productive (wage-labor) sphere, creating a historical overlap. The ‘care crisis scenario diagram’ enables theoretical exploration of different modalities of the experiential contradictions and discontents faced by caregiving women, the tensions and conflicts in their personal and social lives, and the overall decline of care in neoliberal society.

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