Reconceptualizing Work and Building Ruddick's Feminist Solidarity Transnationally

Abstract

I offer a reading Sara Ruddick's account of feminist solidarity as grounded in her reconceptualization of “work” in order to suggest that she provides a framework for transnational feminist solidarity that offers an important augmentation to other contemporary theories of transnational feminist solidarity. Feminist solidarity, according to Ruddick, forms through struggles to work. But what she means by work has not been fully appreciated in the literature on Ruddick. Scholars who focus solely on maternal thinking or even the work of mothering obscure the fact that such work is just her prime example of the reconceptualized notion of work she develops. I unpack her notion of work and show how it functions in a theoretical account of transnational feminist solidarity and feminist resistance movements.

From Silence to Solidarity: Locating the Absent ‘Child Voice’ in the Struggle Against Benefit Sanctions

“…Children's experiences of benefits sanctions, austerity measures, and varying oppositional strategies can be telling considering their oppression and subjugation. Given their traditional exclusion from ‘the political’, children, like other ‘outsiders’ (Scholz, , 395), may have much to offer to efforts of imagining new ways of being and living.…”

“…Solidarity premises mutuality and interdependence, rather than autonomy. As we use it here, solidarity references a provisional unity between interlocutors formed through political struggle which can motivate and guide action (Scholz, ). Solidarity has been critiqued for being: premised on false universalisms or relations of saviour‐vulnerable victim; conditional and easily withdrawn; and mobilised in the interests of capital or various state actors (e.g.…”