Book review: gendered commodity chains: seeing women's work and households in global production

TLDR: Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women's Work and Households in Global Production, edited by Wilma A. Dunaway Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013 as discussed by the authors.

Abstract: Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women’s Work and Households in Global Production, edited by Wilma A. Dunaway Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. 285 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780804789080. One of the highlights of this superb collection of essays on gendered commodity chains, a highlight partly because it draws on the historically seminal work on commodity chains by Immanuel Wallerstein (who is also responsible for the Foreword), is that the authors make liberal reference to pioneering scholars in the fields of women’s paid and unpaid work such as Lourdes Beneria, Diane Elson, Ruth Pearson, Veronika Bennholdt-Thompson, and Maria Mies. These writers broke critical new analytical ground in the 1970s and 1980s in emphasizing the ways in which “production” and “reproduction” were profoundly interlinked with one another. To revisit their perspectives on the myriad forms of female labor that contribute to the accumulation of capital makes for a volume that does serious—and justifiably due —service to feminist theorizing and knowledge over nearly 50 years. Yet while avoiding the all too common fetishization to cite “just published” papers, the collective contributions to Wilma Dunaway’s Gendered Commodity Chains also provide an impressively up-to-the-minute conceptual and empirical mapping of the various ways in which contemporary global capitalism profits from the externalization of so many of its costs to women and their households, and especially the poorest on the periphery of the international economy. …