Gender, Expulsion, and Law Under Racial Capitalism

Abstract

This essay examines how the operation of background rules and institutions provided by law leads to the expulsion of individuals under racial capitalism based upon gender. Aligning itself with anti-capitalist work by critical theorists of social reproduction and intersectionality, it contributes to perspectives on racial capitalism that regard gender, in the way it creates subjects and differentiates between workers, as a co-constituting force with race under racial capitalism. Women and transgender persons, because of gender, are precariously situated on the edge of exile from the economic order. It makes this argument by weaving feminist insights-particularly those articulated in scholarship on social reproduction and intersectionality-with perspectives on racial capitalism.

Standing against racial capitalism: Reconsidering psychology’s role in dismantling systemic racism.

“…Here, patriarchy is coconstitutive of racial capitalism in that it expulses those who fall short of hegemonic gender norms, devalues and commodifies care and intimacy, and violently reifies ingroup/outgroup distinctions (Matambanadzo, 2023). Historically, Western patriarchy has involved the socioeconomic subordination or elimination of outgroup racialized men and women (Curry, 2017b; Hartman, 2022; Sidanius et al, 2017) and the erasure of non-Western models of gender and sexuality (Lugones, 2020; Oyěwùmí, 1997).…”

Abolition and the Welfare State: Implications for Social Welfare

“…A historical survey of U.S. welfare response to the needs of women, however, reveals a deeply paternalistic and stigmatizing approach to public assistance targeting women, with strong racial biases denigrating and limiting benefits for Black women, immigrants, and other women of color (Abramovitz, 1988;Gordon, 1994). The interlocking forces of racial capitalism and gender oppression enabled the escalation of concentrated discipline upon women of color (Matambanadzo, 2022;Quadagno, 1994).…”

“…The 1970s marked a new period of U.S. economic decline and the rising rhetoric and political prominence of conservative (often bipartisan) forces, pushing back against Civil Rights and welfare gains with a highly racialized agenda that has successfully mobilized the rapid growth of the carceral state, on the one hand, and the retrenchment of the welfare state, on the other (Garland, 2002; Murakawa, 2014; Soss et al, 2011; Wacquant, 2009). Indeed, just as 1973 marks the punitive turn , marking the beginning of an over five-fold increase in rates of incarceration in the United States, the period of the early 1970s is also characterized by the decline and increasingly punitive nature of an already disciplining system of social welfare provision (Garland, 2002; Wacquant, 2009).…”

“…More contemporary roots of prison abolition date back to the radical street protests of the 1960s, prison rebellions such as Attica in the early 1970s, and the platforms and actions of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. Abolitionist scholarship—much of which has been shaped by critical feminisms—as represented by the writings of Davis (2003, 2005, 2015), Gilmore (2007, 2022), Richie (2012), Murakawa (2014), Kaba (2021), Ritchie (2017, 2023), Alexander (2010), Hannah-Jones (2019), Law (2009, 2021), and a host of other critical activist scholars have produced a rich conceptual and empirical knowledge base on the carceral state. Mass movements further fueled in the past two decades since the initial 1998 convening of Critical Resistance and ongoing organizing by abolitionist organizations such as INCITE!…”

The White Androcentric Disposition of Capitalist Property

“…Labor extraction, as described above, results in these women selling their labor at low prices as a means of subsistence. While labor might not seem initially amenable to categorization as property, as we discuss above, labor as a valued resource can be framed through the same narrative-property as the relation among caregivers with respect to the valued resource of caregiving labor (Matambanadzo 2022).…”