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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.
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.
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.
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.
significantly affected by austerity and welfare reform and who are devalued and made abject by the symbolic and institutional violence of the austerity programme — single mothers, women reliant on welfare, migrant women and women with disabilities or health conditions — talk about the austerity agenda. Women’s narratives are not straightforward, they dialogue with this discourse in contrasting and contradictory ways, simultaneously reproducing, reinforcing, questioning and talking back to moralistic narratives of hard work, fairness and responsibility. They experience a range
through the lens of class, but also mindful of ‘race’ (immigration and citizenship), age, parenthood and disability — affects the ways in which women are living in and with austerity. Despite austerity decreasing women’s ‘space of possibilities’ in general, as this chapter highlights, the ways in which austerity materializes itself in women’s lives is dependent on the volume, composition and trajectory of their differing economic, cultural and social capital and resources. Those with a lower volume and composition of capital will be ‘closer to necessity’ as opposed
and Serco, who, in different ways, have been responsible for aiding the state’s enforcement of punitive welfare policies, received £4 billion worth of public sector contracts. Atos and Capita, firms that have carried out controversial disability assessments, received a £40 million increase in funding in 2017. This was despite the widespread concerns from the public with the system and its violent and, in some cases, deadly consequences. Figures from a Freedom of Information request found that more than a third of disability assessment reports completed by Capita had
society as democratic citizens. Therefore ‘unlike the protective legislation of the liberal regime, the state-capitalist settlement resulted from a class compromise and represented a democratic advance. Unlike its predecessor, too, the new arrangements served, at least for some and for a while, to stabilize social reproduction’ (109). Gender and racial hierarchy was not absent from these arrangements. Unequal gender relations (as well as ‘race’, disability, age and sexuality) underpin ‘welfare regimes, their outcomes, the organisation of labour … the delivery of
, austerity is lived and felt very differently. Contributing to the growing field of feminist literature on the gendered politics of austerity , Austerity, Women and the Role of the State thus invites its readers to examine the multivalent way in which difference — particularly through the lens of class, but also mindful of ‘race’, age, parenthood, disability and geography — contours how women can live with, navigate through and speak about austerity policies and discourses, and the ways in which austerity intensifies and extends existing social and economic inequalities
