ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to contribute to the development of a substantive concept of social enterprise based on debates within feminism that have shown the importance of the domestic domain and questioned its place in and its nature as an element of women’s emancipation. It outlines the contributions of some of the main schools of Western feminist thought to the inclusion of the domestic domain in political and economic debates. The chapter discusses how these schools of thought question the relation between the domestic domain and the economic and political ones and the hypothesis of their mutual exteriority. It highlights subaltern women’s capacity to constitute alternative political arenas through solidarity and community economic initiatives that are based primarily in the domestic domain. The chapter draws on post-colonial thought, feminist economics, epistemologies of the South and socioeconomics. Post-colonial feminisms point out the importance of the contexts and the intertwining of inequalities blocking the so-desired social justice.
