Series: Gender and Sociology
Series Editors: Sue Scott, Newcastle University, UK and Stevi Jackson, Centre for Women's Studies, University of York, UK
Showcasing high quality research, this series provides a platform for distinctively sociological scholarship that advances the study of gender across the contemporary world. The series is international in scope and diverse in the issues covered, recognising that all aspects of social life are gendered or have some gender dimension.
Gender and Sociology
Offering a unique perspective, this book explores the lived, embodied and affective experiences of reproductive rights activists living under, and mobilizing against, Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban.
Through qualitative research and in-depth interviews with activists, the author exposes the subtle influence of the 8th Amendment on Irish women and their (reproductive) bodies, whether or not they have ever attempted to access a clandestine abortion.
It explains how the everyday embodied practices, bodily labours and affective experiences of women and gestating people were shaped by the 8th amendment and through the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies. In addition, it reveals the integral role of women’s bodies and emotions in changing the political and social landscape in Ireland, through the historical transformation of the country’s abortion laws.
This is a nuanced and compelling analysis of grassroots feminist activism in Russia in the politically turbulent 2010s.
Drawing on rich ethnographic data, the author illustrates how a new generation of activists chose feminism as their main political beacon, and how they negotiated the challenges of authoritarian and conservative trends.
As we witness a backlash against feminism on a global scale with the rise of neo-conservative governments, this highly relevant book decentres Western theory and concepts on feminism and social movements, offering significant insights into how resistance can mobilise and invent creative tactics to cope with an increasingly repressed space for independent political action.
In 1990, disturbing television footage emerged showing the inhumane conditions in which children in Romanian institutions were living. Viewers were shocked that the babies were silent. The so-called ‘Romanian orphans’ became subjects of several international research studies. In parallel, Romania had to reform its child protection system in order to become a member of the European Union.
This book sheds light on the lived experiences of these children, who had become adults by the time the country joined the EU. Uniquely, the book brings together the accounts of those who stayed in institutions, those who grew up in foster care and those who were adopted, both in Romania and internationally. Their narratives challenge stereotypes about these types of care.
Using interviews with women from diverse backgrounds, Dabrowski makes an invaluable contribution to the debates around the gendered politics of austerity in the UK.
Exploring the symbiotic relationship between the state’s legitimization of austerity and women’s everyday experiences, she reveals how unjust policies are produced, how alternatives are silenced and highlights the different ways in which women are used or blamed.
By understanding austerity as more than simply an economic project, this book fills important gaps in existing knowledge on state, gender and class relations in the context of UK austerity.
Austerity, Women and the Role of the State is shortlisted for the 2021 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.
The feeding of human milk to socially and biologically unrelated infants is not a new phenomenon, but the Euroamerican values of individualism have generated expectations that mothers are individually responsible for feeding their own infants.
Using a bio-communities of practice framework, this dynamic new analysis explores the emotional and material dimensions of the growing milk sharing practice in the Global North and its implications for contemporary understandings of infant feeding in the US.
Ranging widely across themes of motherhood, gender and sociology, this is a compelling empirical account of infant feeding that stimulates new thinking about a contentious practice.
The outsourcing of domestic work in the UK has been steadily rising since the 1970s, but there has been little research into White British women who work as independent providers of cleaning services.
Work, Labour and Cleaning is a cross-cultural analysis based on new research into two particular social contexts, one in the UK and one in India. It argues that outsourced domestic cleaning can be undertaken either as work (using mental and manual skills) or as labour (usually defined as unskilled, ‘natural’ women’s work) depending on the social context and working conditions in which it occurs. The book challenges feminist dogma and popular myths about housework.
