Class Questions: Feminist Answers

by Joan Acker

Class is a particularly troublesome issue in the United States and other rich capitalist societies. In this feminist analysis of class, noted sociologist Joan Acker examines and assesses feminist attempts to include white women and people of color in discussions of class. She argues that class processes are shaped through gender, race, and other forms of domination and inequality. Class Questions: Feminist Answers outlines a theory of class as a set of gendered and racialized processes in which people have unequal control over and access to the necessities of life-processes including production, distribution, and paid and unpaid labor. Historically, gender and race-based inequalities were integral to capitalism and they are still fundamental aspects of the class system. Acker argues that capitalist organizations create gendered and racialized class inequalities and outlines a conceptual scheme for analyzing "inequality regimes" in organizations. Finally, the book examines contemporary changes in work and employment and in economic/political processes, including current events like deregulation, downsizing, and off-shoring, that increase inequalities and alter racialized and gendered class relations. This book will appeal to readers interested in a feminist discussion of class as a racialized and gendered process intimately tied to the capitalist economic system.

234 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Stef Rozitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extremely significant piece of work and one that needs to be read more widely and channeled into popular discourse somehow. Acker looks at the way "production" leaves our much work that is necessary to human life which she puts under the umbrella term "reproduction" and shows how class and race differences in access to well-paid jobs is not accidental but is built into the system. She makes a cursory acknowledgement of her US-centric view but in some parts seems to forget (like many US people) that the US way of doing things is not really "normal" but is strange and dystopian from the perspectives of most of the world's population (even if our governments, led by corporate donors seem intent on taking us in that direction).

Having said that many of her observations were at least partly transferable. Her discussion of "caring work" was mainly focussed on unpaid work. This certainly needs acknowledging as worthwhile and the connection between unpaid and underpaid carework was a valuable insight however my own interest is in under-paid pink-collared jobs and I wish Acker had written more about those. Perhaps that was outside the scope. She also promised tangible ideas forward but (as usual with academics) her final chapter was more a summary with some vague hopes than a tangible way forward. I also had a minor nit-pick with her overuse of "I think...".

Nevertheless having been super-critical I have to say I have already recommended this book to a couple of people at work and posted a quote or two from it on Facebook and intend to use it in my literature review. It's well-worth a read and taking further in theory and practice. Her argument for a UBI was very coherent, although (probably since she wrote this) I have seen some fears that capitalism could co-opt UBI all too easily. I believe some of Acker's thinking could be useful for avoiding this eventuality.

People should read this.

[Wenjing Fan · Rating 4 out of 5]

SIMP28, only until this semester that I know the famous books by 上野千鹤子 hasn’t been translated into English. Then I read this book, published in 2006 and have more discussions on different topics around class and feminism, and try to find the intersectional sections around them. Then I began to know how different Maxism feminism are in west and east