Conclusion: The Significance of the Household to Asia’s Transformation and to Studies of the Global Political Economy

Abstract

The contributors in this volume have examined how the household has been central to Asia’s economic transformation. Historically, households have never existed outside of capitalist relations, a point exemplified in an early study of Indian workers: Maria Mies’s The Lace Makers of Narsapur (1982). Drawing on research conducted in India, Mies sought to demonstrate that the prevalence of gendered cottage industries such as lace making was not a temporary stage in the modernization of developing country economies but a permanent fixture of capitalist production. The lace makers were considered to be a part of the informal economy, their income a part of everyday, normal ‘housework’ and the subsistence economy. This gendered ideological framing of women’s work contributed to continuing levels of poverty and marginalization, as well as increasing their labour burden. Despite the years that have passed since the publication of this book, the responsive policy interventions, and academic movements that have attempted to uncover and address this ideological frame, the contributions in this volume demonstrates that such ideologies which naturalize and tie — and sometimes equate — women to their households persists. As Thanh-Dam Truong notes, ‘[no] production system operates without a reproduction system and it should not be surprising that the globalization of production is accompanied by its intimate “other” i.e. reproduction’ (1996: 47).