Abstract

Feminist political economy has illuminated the gendered dimensions of the globalisation of production. Whilst this literature provides essential insights on gendered exploitation in export-oriented industries, women’s work in localised labour markets in the Global South remains underexplored. This paper seeks to address this gap by putting into dialogue three bodies of literature – feminist political economy of globalisation, political economy of development in southern Africa and the social reproduction of the everyday. It proposes an integrated conceptual framework to analyse women’s working lives and applies it to northern Mozambique. It makes two key findings. First, the lives of those working in localised labour markets are shaped by global capitalism through extreme fragmentation of labour regimes forcing people into multiple precarious forms of work – a process that entails the appropriation of women’s productive and reproductive labour. Second, the imperatives of social reproduction shape employment trajectories and expose differentiation among working women, seen for example through gendered constraints to mobility, care obligations and contributions to ceremonies. The implications are that the analysis of women’s working lives needs to capture three key aspects: social differentiation among working women, temporal and spatial dynamics of the everyday and the centrality of the reproduction of the social.

摘要

女权主义政治经济学阐明了生产全球化的性别维度。虽然这些文献提供了关于出口导向型行业中性别剥削的重要见解，但女性在全球南方劳动力市场的工作仍未得到充分探索。本文试图通过将三种文学体——全球化的女权主义政治经济学、南部非洲发展的政治经济学和日常生活的社会再生产——进行对话来解决这一差距。它提出了一个综合概念框架来分析妇女的工作生活并将其应用于莫桑比克北部。它有两个关键发现。第一的，全球资本主义通过劳动制度的极端碎片化迫使人们从事多种不稳定的工作形式，从而塑造了在本地化劳动力市场工作的人们的生活——这一过程需要占用妇女的生产性和再生产性劳动。其次，社会再生产的必要性塑造了就业轨迹并暴露了职业女性之间的差异，例如通过性别限制流动性、护理义务和对仪式的贡献。这意味着对女性工作生活的分析需要抓住三个关键方面：职业女性之间的社会差异、日常生活的时间和空间动态以及工作的中心地位。社会再生产的必要性塑造了就业轨迹并暴露了职业妇女之间的差异，例如从性别限制流动性、护理义务和对仪式的贡献中可以看出。这意味着对女性工作生活的分析需要抓住三个关键方面：职业女性之间的社会差异、日常生活的时间和空间动态以及工作的中心地位。社会再生产的必要性塑造了就业轨迹并暴露了职业妇女之间的差异，例如从性别限制流动性、护理义务和对仪式的贡献中可以看出。这意味着对女性工作生活的分析需要抓住三个关键方面：职业女性之间的社会差异、日常生活的时间和空间动态以及工作的中心地位。社会的再生产。