Androcentric biases and feminist tools for social transformation in community-based care initiatives

Abstract

We are currently experiencing a care crisis in which increasing demands are being placed on flawed and under-resourced models of care provision. In response, alternative collective care provision initiatives have begun to articulate new forms of care organisation. Many operate on a self-managed basis and align themselves with the principles of Social and Solidarity and Feminist Economics. In this context, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork between 2021 and 2023 in order to better understand three cases from Spain. This included 27 in-depth interviews, 6 workshops, several participatory observation sessions, and e-research. The first initiative was an association of domestic workers that provides care for the elderly, the second a group of families organised around an alternative schooling project, and the third a worker cooperative that produces agro-ecological food, offers a catering service and facilitates co-responsible childcare. These projects and their participants dwell in spaces of tension between gift economics and the productive-mercantile demands of the market. We observed that androcentric inertias persist in these spaces, and (re)produce an inequitable sexual division of labour that manifests in the unfair distribution of and recognition afforded to tasks, responsibilities, functions and roles. Relatedly, a "short-sighted productivism" was evident across all three cases. Gift economy theory provides a framework that facilitates a deeper understanding of the relations of reciprocity that sustain these projects. This contextualised the threats, tensions and contradictions undermining these initiatives, as well as identifying and making sense of the feminist tools developed in response, such as making visible and problematizing inequalities, as well as practicing self-care. The paper aims to make a contribution to existing research into the praxis of Social and Solidarity Economics through the Feminist Economic and Moral Economics lenses.