Female employment from the household. Towards a comprehensive analysis of work-life articulation

Research on women’s employment has proliferated over recent decades, often under a perspective that conceptualizes female labour market activity as independent of male presences and absences in the productive and reproductive spheres. In the face of these approaches, the article argues the need to focus on the couple as the unit of analysis of work-life articulation. After referring to the main theoretical arguments that, from a gender perspective within labour studies, have pointed out the relevance of placing the household as the central space for the analysis of the sexual division of labour, the article reviews different empirical contributions that have incorporated such perspective in the international literature. Next, the state of the art in the Spanish literature is presented, before arguing the desirability of applying such framework of analysis to the study of employment and care work in Spanish households, which are at present undergoing major transformations.

Imperative, subjunctive, and the desiderative-appellative space in Spanish

After defining the “enunciative scheme” (sentence type) as a communicative unit, the imperative is characterized as a morphologized modality of appellative kind used when the following conditions occur: appellative meaning, 2nd person, future tense and absence of negation. In Spanish, any variation of any of these requirements determines that the subjunctive is used. We reject the idea that the imperative is a variant of subjunctive specialized in appellative function and that both modes share a desiderative morpheme. Working in this way means attributing to a morphological category of the verb a property that actually corresponds to the enunciative schemes (sentence types). We propose to integrate the imperative and subjunctive in the framework of what we call the “desiderative-appellative space”. This “space” brings together various grammatical or grammaticalized means based on the imperative and the subjunctive. Semantically, it is organized around a component of desirability (action appears as desirable) that, by varying several factors, configures a route that goes from a center (the imperative) to a periphery (the expression of desire).