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초록

This paper examines the weight of care labor in capitalist society through the Jaewon Yoon’s theoretical framework of the care crisis and selected short stories by Doris Lessing. In capitalism, care and reproductive labor occupy the lower levels of the labor hierarchy and have been persistently undervalued economically, socially, and culturally. The weight of care labor has historically become “lighter” than ever before. Under the neoliberal trajectory of capitalism—marked by women’s partial entry into waged labor and the commodification of care—the weight of unpaid care labor has been reduced to an unprecedented degree. Yet this very “lightness” paradoxically intensifies the burden borne by care providers, still overwhelmingly women, producing care overload, a mismatch between changing ideas and lived realities, and women’s confinement to care labor without alternative social positions. Written in the mid-twentieth century, Lessing’s short stories capture the collision between different cultural understandings and economic realities of care labor, vividly representing a condition in which care is devalued even as it weighs heavily on women’s lives.

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