Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Stratified reproduction is a term originally coined by Shellee Colen in her classic 1986 study of West Indian nannies and their (female) employers in New York City, which found inequalities of race, class, gender, culture, and legal status played out on a social field that was both domestic and transnational. Colen elaborated the term in her later work to describe situations in which women perform physical and social reproductive labor structured by economic, political, and social forces and differentiated unequally across hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and place in a global economy ( Colen 1995 ). Many feminist social scientists since the 1980s have adopted stratified reproduction as a theoretical framework within which to examine a variety of issues relevant to the intersections of reproduction and stratification. The term stratified reproduction implicitly acknowledges both the sexual politics and the political economy of reproduction. In this way it derives from, and elaborates on, second-wave feminist concerns with removing childbearing (biological reproduction) and domestic labor (social reproduction) from the realm of the “natural” and placing them squarely under critical, social scientific analysis. Researchers of stratified reproduction continue the feminist project, demystifying still relatively unexamined gender relations and gender inequalities, particularly ... log in or subscribe to read full text