Darío Doña-Falcón

In the 70s, Marxist-feminist currents defined gender through the division of labor that relegated women to the home and made their work unwaged. However, the assignment of domestic tasks to women remains a more complex process than it has been made out to be. By opening the scopes from the Marxist feminist debates around gender, this study aims to define the gender category through concepts developed in the critique of political economy and its study of the capitalist social relation. Through this insight, I argue that during the first two centuries of capitalism the necessities for the establishment of the family institution and the figure of the free individual laborer were resolved through a specific division of labor that created a relation of domination within the family household, which was reified as the category of gender. By understanding how the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production give way to the division of labor, this study attempts to revitalize the Marxist debate on gender and relate it to the cycle of capitalist production.

The history of the study of emotions has given way to several disciplines that have expanded our knowledge of the human mind, like psychology and philosophy. In our current times, Sentiment Analysis presents itself as a new path to study this field through automated and computerized means. However, automated systems can also carry many biases, such as sexism, thus possibly skewing their analysis towards a perpetuation of misogynistic views. By employing different Sentiment Analysis models on two sexism inventories, we observe that the emotional analysis these methods carry out varies in effectiveness and that this analysis can only reach a superficial understanding of sexism. Through these findings, we elaborate a critique of the technological concept of objectivity and neutrality in science. This study brings the feminist epistemological view to light to warn against an uncritical, indiscriminate use of technologies that can result in the further perpetuation and standardization of sexist biases in science.