No Place Like Home: Organizing Home-Based Labor in the Era of Structural Adjustment (New Approaches in Sociology: Studies in Social Inequality, Social Changes, and Social Justice)

"No Place Like Home" examines the emergence of home-based women workers as paradigmatic figures of contemporary capitalism, neoliberal governmentality, and socio-political contestation. Far from an isolated or contingent situation, home-based work constitutes today an enormous arena of "invisible" social and political struggles of subaltern and ethno-racially subordinated women. As feminist political economists and critical geographers have noted, through the ongoing reduction of the place of the home to capitalist space and the continuity and differences with the past, and further reveals how the arcane structures of sexual division and work at home in turn render invisible the grassroots organizing and political contestation being led by home-based women workers in the United States and across the world today. In deconstructing the dualities that undergird the location of work at home, Staples shows how home-based work "confuses the categories" of traditional social science, including the distinctions made between formal and informal work, private and public sectors, and productive and reproductive labor. Introduction: The Invisible Threads Of Homeworker Organizing -- The Turbulent World Of Home-based Work -- No Place Like Home: Marxist And Feminist Topographies Of House And Homework -- Homeworker Organizing: Child-care Workers Under Welfare Reform In The United States -- Child-care Workers In And Against The State -- The Biopolitics Of Homework -- Political Economy And The Unpredictable Politics Of Women's Home-based Work. David E. Staples. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 157-169) And Index. Examines the emergence of home-based women workers as paradigmatic figures of contemporary capitalism, neoliberal governmentality, and socio-political contestation. This book talks about home-based work that constitutes an enormous arena of "invisible" social and political struggles of subaltern and ethno-racially subordinated women.