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Class and Gender in Australian Income Security

School of Behavioural Sciences Macquarie University

Women's interests are central to current reconstruction of the Australian welfare state, yet feminist theorising has less and less to say about state, class and gender. In part this is because its most promising paradigm, feminist extension of Marxist theory, has not responded to criticism for reducing gender to class and conflating function, effect and intention. This article is an attempt to rework the theoretical nexus of class and gender in the context of a specific institutional structure. It sees income secu rity provisions as historically constructed in the day-to-day politics of the welfare state, through which its structures are simultaneously 'classed' and 'gendered'. Australian income se curity is defined through intersecting frameworks of categorical eligibility and selective, needs-based allocation. Its tax/transfer framework situates the income security system within a larger political economy of redistribution. Class and gender structures lie in the conditions under which income security measures pro vide subsistence outside the labour market and the family unit within which the calculus of trade-off is determined. Allocative frameworks have class and gender effects to the extent that the income security system enforces family solidarities, gender ideologies and labour market incentives. Class and gender inter ests are embodied in terms of trade among income, gender and life-cycle groups in redistribution within and against histori cally constructed political and functional limits.

Journal of Sociology, Vol. 24, No. 3, 377-397 (1988)
DOI: 10.1177/144078338802400302


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