‘Intimacy, informalization and intersecting inequalities: tracing the linkages’

This essay traces linkages among the intimacy of familial household relations, the informalization and market dynamics of capitalist economies, and the intersection of multiple inequalities within and between state/nations. I also explore how informality is not only gendered but inextricably racialized. The latter is rarely addressed, much less integrated, in conventional accounts of informality. Yet it is a particularly urgent consideration in the context of today’s between- and within-nation inequalities and their corollary harms, resentments, violence and conflicts. I begin by clarifying the thematic foci of intimacy, informality and intersectionality, and why I foreground them in this essay. I turn next to why state/nations are central features in my account, beginning not in the modern era but millennia ago with the earliest known ‘archaic‘ states and their unprecedented regulation of sexual/familial, ’economic’ (property) and membership arrangements. Next follows a discussion of state/nation formation in the tumultuous transition to European modernity and its emerging liberal, capitalist, imperialist and racializing projects. I then review neoliberal economic developments and current conditions of informality, which includes a survey of liberal, marxist and feminist analyses and their policy recommendations. A concluding section draws together key arguments and their implications.