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Women and Homelessness: Winning and Losing in the Welfare State
No full textIt has long been argued that homelessness is a gendered experience. Thus responses to homelessness by the state will impact differently on men and women. Drawing on the literature that examines the meaning of homelessness and responses to it, this paper will examine the implications of a rights-based system in England which strongly differentiates between those with and without children and the implications of this for homeless women, both with and without children. It will contrast this rights-based system with the responses of other welfare systems and their outcomes for women
Values Beyond Value? Is Anything Safe from being Subsumed by the Logic of Capitalism?
No full textThere has been a great deal of interest recently in how capital has intervened in almost every area of life, leading some to propose new forms of capital eg ‘emotional capitalism’ (Illouz), and others to suggest that processes of valuation are now the major method for understanding the social world (Arviddson, Adkins and Lury). Whilst, no doubt, capital behaves according to its own logic, finding new lines of flight, converting affects such as sentiment and suffering into value, making multi-culturalism marketable, generating new forms of bio-capital, and making many of our actions subject to the logic of calculation (our writing for instance), I want to explore what is left behind. If we only understand the world from the perspective of the logic of capital does anything remain? I’ve been caught in Bourdieu’s paradox for some time. Is it possible to escape? Are there any values beyond valuation
Modern Workplaces and Modern Families: Revising the Work-Family Concept
No full textThe recent government response to the Consultation on Modern Workplaces proposes revisions to the current administration and concept of parental leave alongside extending the right to request flexible working to other employees. These proposals in many ways reflect the package of rights available in Sweden. While the experience in Sweden suggests that this may encourage greater utilisation of parental leave, and in particular, increase fathers' uptake of such rights, it is unlikely to fundamentally challenge their underpinning gendered nature. In this paper it is argued that instead of focusing on re-branding the current package of rights, the legislation should instead re-envision the concept of the family. The traditional male breadwinner and dual breadwinner families have been the typical focus of these rights, so this approach will be critically contrasted with a focus on a wider understanding of the family encompassing intergenerational, multi-household and other atypical family care models. It is argued that such an approach may offer a more appropriate understanding of the work-family conflict which better addresses the cmpeting needs of working carers and atypical family forms
Home and State: Reflections on Metaphor and Practice
Get PDFHome is an evocative and fluid concept which has significance for all people across several scales of life: these scales include the self, our relationships and family, our physical resting place, our cultures, the nation, and even the planet. Home is a pervasive concept, sometimes so pervasive that we don’t even notice when it is being invoked. And it is a space which compresses many normative values, as well as the normalities associated with family, culture and nation. Thinking about the home requires us to cross or transcend several dualisms, such as those between the individual and the collective, the symbolic and material, inner psychological space and the outside world, and public and private. This paper considers the idea of home as a metaphor in conceptualizing the state. The focus is not on ideas of nation and homeland which are often found in general political discourse, but rather the deployment of ‘home’ in governmental, institutional, and policy formations. My aim is not to rehabilitate the idea of the home as a metaphor for the state, nor to undertake a comparative analysis, but rather to observe the presence and absence of ‘home’ in several contexts and illustrate the diversity of its meanings in relation to the state. The first part will outline scholarly and feminist interest in the idea of home. My focus is on Anglo-centric commentary about the home, though this itself has been strongly influenced by French feminism, and more generally by French phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The second part ofthe paper will consider the idea of home in the political and public domain in three national contexts: Sweden, the UK, and Australia. A final revised version of this article is published in the Griffith Law Review, vol 23, no 2 (2014), DOI: 10.1080/10383441.2014.962447
Missing the Link: A Gendered Perspective on Labour Regulation in Global Value Chains
No full textThis paper argues that feminist scholarship has a aluable contribution to make to GVC analysis. It builds on the approach develoepd in my recent monograph, Gender, Law and Justice in a Global Market (Cambridge UP, 2011), to consider the way in which contextually specific 'gender contracts' relating to responsibilities for work and care contribute to the way in which women engage with labour markets. Women's association with the socially reproductive sphere contributes to the risks they face as well as the flexibility they embody. Feminist critiques of labour law which address the way in which it constructs boundaries between unvalued, unregulated social reproductive activiteis and employment have particular resonance for GVC analysis with its concern to trace the way in which each stage in the process of production (including formal and informal working) contributes to the distribution of value and the creation of risk for workers. These critiques have also revealed the gendered consequences of the commercialisation of labour relationships associated with the provision of services particularly in relation to body work and the challenges these developments pose for the conceptual basis for labour law. However the paper extends its analysis to address the generalised private standard setting which has emerged as governance at firm level and the macroeconomic regulatory contexts that contribute to the distribution of value within the chains. The international women's rights movement in conjunction with labour activists have developed a framework for implementation of increasingly substantive rights for women. If national economic policies are increasingly dominated by global and regional trade regimes on the one hand and governance through private standards on the other, what happens to any wider state-based gender strategy? Is there transference of 'rights' discourse from the state and incorporation into the market governance of trade and private standard setting? The paper therefore argues that bringing gender into the social context is essential
Gender and Precarity in Contemporary Italy: Labor, Value, Social Reproduction
Get PDFThis lecture examines the emergence of the discourse and movement concerning precarity, one of the newest movements shaping politics in Europe. It argues that precarity is a constitutive aspects of life and identity, not just a type of contract. It is an essential condition which differs according to gender and is shared especially among young women, migrants and poor people
Revisiting Feminist Jurisprudence: A Rehabilitation
Get PDFThis paper seeks to revive feminist interest in jurisprudence. However, it does not do so by conducting a historical inquiry designed to restore forgotten female jurists or reveal women’s contributions to the jurisprudential tradition. Instead, it comprises an invitation to rethink the encounter of jurisprudence with feminism. To this end it considers what counts as feminist jurisprudence, situating the rise of legal scholarship that defines itself as such, and setting out the notion of positionality as the criterion to judge what else can be included under this label. Thereafter it discusses the distinctive strands of what I deem to be feminist jurisprudence, before concluding with a call for a feminist re-imagining of jurisprudence as an activity both theoretical and pragmatic, and also as one which might hold hitherto un-thought possibilities for a feminist analysis and critique of law
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