I once heard a story about an ordinary rural woman. Born in a small village in southeast China in the 1970s, she had four siblings, two older sisters, one younger sister, and one youngest brother. Her family was not rich. At that time, a small household in a small village in that area relied mostly on small-scale farming, rice, sugarcane, tea, and cattle breeding. Children were a promising source of labor that could translate into economic growth for the family in the future. Therefore, before China's one-child policy, it was not uncommon to see a household with five, six, seven or more children.
One day, at the age of eight, when she was in the second grade of elementary school, her father asked her to quit school to help run the family business. It was a bolt from the blue. She tried to negotiate with her father that she could work on the farm early in the morning and then go to class, which is exactly what she was doing: Dedicated in the farm mud at 4 a.m., exhausted in the classroom at 7 a.m. Her teacher tried to dissuade her father from this decision, arguing that his daughter was a bright child and would have a bright future if she stayed in school. The answer was no. There was no point in investing educational and economic resources in a daughter who would be married off to another family anyway. Compared to a doomed investment, the immediate value of the domestic care work girls could provide was obviously more attractive.
The next day, at four in the morning, she went to the farm with her hoe as usual, but this time she knew she wouldn't have to go home to get her school bag. Hoeing the farm again and again, she spent the next ten years doing the arduous domestic work, unpaid, undervalued and unseen, along with her other three female siblings (the male sibling was exempted from this labor).
That woman is my mother.
My mother's story epitomizes the struggle of women and girls to navigate gender norms, societal expectations, domestic inequalities and the heavy burden of care work. At the bottom of the global economy, women and girls, especially women and girls living in poverty and from marginalized groups, are putting in 12.5 billion hours every day of care work for free, and countless more for poverty wages. The unpaid and underpaid care work adds value to the economy of at least $10.8 trillion, while most of the financial benefits accrue to the richest, the majority of whom are men (Coffey et al., 2020). This gendered division of labor and wealth gap outlines a sexist neoliberal economic structure that exploits women and girls in terms of wages, personal well-being, time, and opportunities for educational, social, and political participation.
Several questions haunt my mind: What factors contribute to the perpetuation of this exploitative division of labor? Why does the neoliberal market system exclude or overlook care work? How can we address the looming crisis of care and wealth inequalities?
I started to connect these questions with my own research in climate change, carbon neocolonialism, and environmental justice. More and more climate scholars have recognized that environmental problems are gendered, and that environmental degradation is shaped by masculinist social injustices. “Industrial/breadwinner masculinities are defined as ‘malestream patriarchal, hegemonic and normative masculinities (which we apply primarily to men, but also to the masculinities adopted by some women and non-binary/genderqueer people as well)’ who background the social and environmental implications of industrialization for the sake of capital growth and its associated accesses to power and privileges” (Hedenqvist et al., p. 208, 2021). Feminist political economy and ecofeminism criticize how extractivism is deeply gendered in terms of the violence it imposes on land, bodies, and ecosystems, especially on women of color (Murrey & Mollett, 2023). In these arguments, the orthodox sake of economic growth, industrial development, resource extraction, land and property ownership, and power accumulation (the list goes on and on) is highly gendered. Rather than being mainstream, neoliberal economic conventions can be better defined as “malestream” (Hedenqvist et al., p. 208, 2021).
Going back to the questions, the neoliberal market favors profitability, operational efficiency, capitalist growth, and anything that can represent the successful, powerful, and wealthy male imagery. How could we expect it to act genuinely (not superficially and unequally) for the environment, when it affects the figures in corporate financial reports and national GDP? How could we expect it to pay massive amounts of money for women's unpaid and underpaid care work when it can easily be evaded through gendered social norms and domestic extraction?
What are the solutions? What's the way out of the malestream trap? If the muscular neoliberal economy is all about money and growth, then the feminist human economy is the best rebuttal to it. Feminist economy helps us to question what we value in society and why, – asking why adding millions to the bank accounts of the super-rich and fueling ever more excessive greenhouse gas emissions is more valuable than caring for children, the sick or the elderly (Coffey et al., 2020). Feminist perspectives reject the capitalist obsession with growth and productivity, which fuels environmental destruction, and instead promote agroecology, community-based resource management, and the defense of indigenous knowledge (Moreano Venegas et al., 2021). Feminist scholars argue that solutions like GDP-based economic growth and carbon markets do not address the deeper violence of dispossession and commodification that lie at the heart of environmental crises (Moreano Venegas et al., 2021). Overall, feminist perspectives challenge the malestream, recentering what has been marginalized, overlooked, and undervalued, whether it is the injustice of women's and girls' unpaid and underpaid care work, or the unequally distributed impacts of environmental degradation and climate change.
What the muscular malestream excludes and harms, feminism seeks to nurture and heal. The path is neither easy nor straightforward, but it is a journey we must take—together, with care and conviction.
Work Credits
Coffey, C., Espinoza Revollo, P., Harvey, R., Lawson, M., Parvez Butt, A., Piaget, K., Sarosi, D., & Thekkudan, J. (2020). Time to Care: Unpaid and underpaid care work and the global inequality crisis. https://doi.org/10.21201/2020.5419
Hedenqvist, R., Pulé, P. M., Vetterfalk, V., & Hultman, M. (2021). When gender equality and Earth care meet: Ecological masculinities in practice. Gender, Intersectionality and Climate Institutions in Industrialised States, 207–225. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003052821-15/GENDER-EQUALITY-EARTH-CARE-MEET-ROBIN-HEDENQVIST-PAUL-PUL
Moreano Venegas, M., Lang, M., Jurado, G., & Ruales, G. (2021). Climate justice from the perspective of Latin American and other Southern Feminisms. october. https://www.rosalux.de/en/publication/id/45339/climate-justice-from-the-perspective-of-latin-american-and-other-southern-feminisms-1
Murrey, A., & Mollett, S. (2023). Extraction is not a metaphor: Decolonial and Black Geographies against the gendered and embodied violence of extractive logics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 48(4), 761–780. https://doi.org/10.1111/TRAN.12610
