The concept of reproductive labour is highly gendered and central to an analysis of gender inequality. It includes all those aspects of labour which constitutes unpaid and up until very recently uncounted work which enables the ‘reproduction’ of waged labour. This therefore encompasses child birth, child care, cleaning, cooking, child care and other areas typically designated as household and ‘women’s labour’.
Published in Chapter:
New Kids on the Block: What Gender Economics and Palermo Tell Us about Trafficking in Human Beings
Carrie Pemberton Ford (University of the Free State, South Africa & Cambridge Centre for Applied Research in Human Trafficking, UK)
Copyright: © 2015
|Pages: 20
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-8611-3.ch009
Abstract
Like Gender Economics, Trafficking in persons has only recently emerged into academic consciousness and business environment concerns, as a discrete area of study with its own particular areas of legal, socio-anthropological and economic principles, in the first decades of this third millennium. New discourses raise fresh questions and they are legion. The ‘new kids' seek to make sense of challenging phenomena and outline the terms through which, Trafficking in persons it is to be articulated to the wider academy, public services, market institutions, and civil society. This chapter explicates the connectedness of critiques Gender Economics has been using on businesses, to see how Human Traffickers exploit people's bodies and their gendered realities. There is certain passivity towards the human, inbuilt in neo-liberal markets which commodify the whole of life. Those least able to protect themselves from the abusive ‘entrepreneurship' of traffickers are traded, with their gendered reality affecting prices and outcomes.