I wish to thank Inés Valdez for her generous review and her incisive comments, and Daniel I. O’Neill at Perspectives on Politics for proposing this exchange. After her precise summary of my book, Valdez raises two important issues, which offer me the opportunity to both clarify some arguments advanced in the book and think about how they can be pushed further.

First, Valdez highlights how, although my book mentions the transnational level as important, it does not really analyze the transnational nature of the reproduction of history. This is a spot-on observation, and after reading her illuminating book, I am even more convinced of the importance of the transnational in our de-temporalization of injustice. For instance, the persistence of the gendered division of domestic labor (GDDL)—which I discuss in chapters 6 and 7—is transnational in nature. GDDL is also newly reproduced in many European and “Western” countries through the employment of female migrant labor from, for instance, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, African, and Asian countries (on the European context, see Alasia Nuti, “Temporary Labor Migration within the EU as Structural Injustice,” Ethics & International Affairs, 32, 2018). The division of domestic labor remains gendered, but to understand its new reproduction, we need to look at transnational changes and strive to build transnational solidarity in feminist movements. Feminist movements looking at GDDL as only a domestic issue would enable (or, at least, do not put a halt to) its transnational reproduction. That said, I think that the general theoretical and normative framework provided by the book would encourage this type of scholarly analysis and activist practice, rather than undermine it. Indeed, a truly emancipatory transnational politics cannot do without de-temporalizing injustice and considering the dynamic reproduction of history.

Second, Valdez is skeptical about the power of integration to challenge women’s segregation in traditionally female jobs (i.e., the so-called horizontal dimension of gender occupational segregation). As she points out, without a transformation in consciousness, the relations of women and men in integrated professions may not change. I do not disagree with her. However, my argument in the book is not that we should prioritize a politics of “presence,” so to speak, over a politics of “ideas” but only that the former—when it is properly justified—has an expressive value in the case of professions for which certain bodies have been historically seen as unfit. Moreover, a radical transformation of gender relations should be thought of holistically. An integrative policy like the one I defend in the book should be included in a comprehensive policy package aimed at tackling gender injustice and inequality in all their interconnected and intersectional dimensions. I discuss in the book some specific policies that can be transformative (e.g., a mandatory caregiving service and the bystander approach to the prevention of intimate partner violence and sexual violence), but none of them should be seen as individually sufficient even to address the dimension of gender inequality they aim to contribute to tackling, let alone gender injustice as a whole. Moreover, any policy making can be truly transformative only when it is informed and supported by feminist activism centered on the reproduction of unjust history like the forms of activist politics that I engage with in chapter 8 of the book. My aim was mainly to show how recognizing that the unjust history of gender relations is newly reproduced can be fruitful in assessing different types of policies and conceiving of policy making itself as an important tool of redress.

Inés Valdez has raised very important issues, and I hope to have shown how the framework advanced in the book can at least orient our thinking about them.