"Care" as a category of analysis of the socioeconomic. A theoretical proposal for transformation from feminist economics

Abstract

This article highlights the centrality of the notion of "care" or, more specifically, "care work" as a key of social analysis and a cornerstone in the configuration of feminist economics as an alternative paradigm to classical or orthodox economic thought. Heir to the Marxist debates on domestic work in the 1960s and 1970s, this paradigmatic proposal reveals the importance of care tasks as the engine of economies and reproduction of societies, questioning their invisibility within the perspective hegemonic economic. In this way, and for this writing, we reconstruct a map of the main categories that provide the foundation for this conceptual matrix, as well as remarking some of its precautions and drifts. Thus, feminist economics disputes the orthodox economic approaches on the production and reproduction of societies, generating for this porpuse its own grammar of analysis of the social as well as highlights the political dimension of the theory for the transformation of the “heteropatriarchal capitalist order” as a socio-economic system that opposes life.