2024/01/11 by Resha T. Swanson-Varner, Erin D. Carreon · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Social Work Education and Practice #Feminist Theory and Gender Studies #Theological Perspectives and Practices
paper · doi:10.1177/08861099231223935
openalex publication_date 2024/01/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Despite efforts by scholars to visibilize Black women's community work, we still lack a framework that captures the nuances in the work arrangements of Black women serving and advocating for their communities. Our paper introduces a new conceptual framework, the Continuum of Transformative and Reproductive Labor (CTRL), to recognize this hidden multiform labor of racialized women. The CTRL places community work that reproduces oppressive social structures on a spectrum opposite what we call transformative labor—labor that disrupts systems of oppression. The CTRL framework distinguishes social reproductive and transformative community work along four dimensions, (1) the type of power each produces, (2) workers’ autonomy and leadership, (3) workers’ motivation, and (4) how the work is valued. We explore the utility of the CTRL framework for analyzing multiple types of community work Black women perform by highlighting historical and contemporary cases in two different labor contexts. Ultimately, we make a key contribution to feminist social work; Recognizing the community as a site of social reproductive labor, we create a new framework to acknowledge Black women's labor in the community as distinct in its capacity to transform social systems by resisting the reproduction of racial and gender inequality.