This book is concerned with the gender order of post-Fordism, and especially the labour demanded from many women by post-Fordist capitalism. It maps and traces these demands as well their entanglement in complex processes of value creation. In so doing the contributors elaborate how processes of financialization; calls for work-readiness; new modes of economic calculation; processes of economization, and emergent regulatory strategies are reconfiguring labour and life in post-Fordism and summoning new forms of ‘women’s work’. Contributors also map how these same processes are repositioning feminism, especially feminism as a mode of critique. Feminism here stands not in an external relation to the objects and matters it seeks to critique but as implicated in those very objects. In mapping this terrain Gender and Labour in New Times opens out new feminist research agendas for the study of the post-Fordist labour and the modes of regulation that post-Fordism as a regime of capital accumulation entails. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies.
Introduction: Gender and Labour in New Times: An Introduction 1. The Feminisation of Finance: Gender, Labour and the Limits of Inclusion Fiona Allon 2. The Sexual Contract, Youth, Masculinity and the Uncertain Promise of Waged Work in Austerity Britain 3. Housework, Wages and Money: The Category of the Female Principal Breadwinner in Financial Capitalism 4. Legal Form and Temporal Rationalities in UK Work-Life Balance Law 5. Feminism and the Technological Age
Lisa Adkins is BHP Billiton Professor of Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor (2015-19). She is joint Editor-in-Chief of Australian Feminist Studies. Maryanne Dever is Professor and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She is joint Editor-in-Chief of Australian Feminist Studies.
