Lisa Adkins - Gender and Labour in New Times

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 financialisation; 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 womens 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.

Lisa Adkins is BHP Billiton Professor of Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and Academy of Finland Distinguished Professor (201519). 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.

Edited by

Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever

First published 2017

by Routledge

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ISBN 13: 978-1-138-68335-8

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The publisher accepts responsibility for any inconsistencies that may have arisen during the conversion of this book from journal articles to book chapters, namely the possible inclusion of journal terminology.

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Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

The chapters in this book were originally published in Australian Feminist Studies, volume 29, issue 79 (March 2014). When citing this material, please use the original page numbering for each article, as follows:

Introduction

Gender and Labour in New Times: An Introduction

Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever

Australian Feminist Studies, volume 29, issue 79 (March 2014) pp. 111

Chapter 1

The Feminisation of Finance: Gender, Labour and the Limits of Inclusion

Fiona Allon

Australian Feminist Studies, volume 29, issue 79 (March 2014) pp. 1230

Chapter 2

The Sexual Contract, Youth, Masculinity and the Uncertain Promise of Waged Work in Austerity Britain

Linda McDowell

Australian Feminist Studies, volume 29, issue 79 (March 2014) pp. 3149

Chapter 3

Housework, Wages and Money: The Category of the Female Principal Breadwinner in Financial Capitalism

Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever

Australian Feminist Studies, volume 29, issue 79 (March 2014) pp. 5066

Chapter 4

Legal Form and Temporal Rationalities in UK WorkLife Balance Law

Emily Grabham

Australian Feminist Studies, volume 29, issue 79 (March 2014) pp. 6784

Chapter 5

Feminism and the Technological Age

Anna Yeatman

Australian Feminist Studies, volume 29, issue 79 (March 2014) pp. 85100

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Lisa Adkins is an Academy of Finland Distinguished (FiDiPro) Professor and the BHP Billiton Chair of Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her contributions and interventions in the discipline of Sociology lie in the areas of economic sociology (especially the sociology of labour), social and cultural theory and feminist theory. Her recent research focuses on the restructuring of labour, money and time in post-Fordist capitalism. Publications from this research have appeared in a number of journals including South Atlantic Quarterly, Feminist Review and Social Epistemology. Her next book The Time of Money extends this work. Key publications include The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract: Working and Living in Contingency (with Maryanne Dever, 2016); Measure and Value (with Celia Lury, 2012); What is the Empirical? (with Celia Lury, 2009); Feminism After Bourdieu (with Bev Skeggs, 2005); Revisions: Gender and Sexuality in Late Modernity (2002) and Gendered Work (1995). She is joint editor-in-chief of the journal Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge).

Fiona Allon is ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her Future Fellowship project addresses the increasing prominence of financial logics in the everyday life of households. It incorporates a particular focus on gender and finance and uses feminist theory to rethink categories of labour, value and economy.

Maryanne Dever is Professor and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She was previously Director of the Centre for Womens Studies and Gender Research at Monash University and President of the Australian Womens and Gender Studies Association (AWGSA) 20062010. Her research interests encompass archival studies and feminist literary and cultural history. Her recent publications include the co-authored book, The Intimate Archive (2009). She has also published on debates in womens and gender studies and on women, work and higher education, and is joint editor-in-chief of Australian Feminist Studies.

Emily Grabham is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Kent, UK. Her research interests include gender and labour regulation, law and time, and feminist legal theory. She is the holder of an ESRC Future Research Leaders Award for a 3 year project investigating the legal regulation of precarious workers with care commitments in the UK. Her forthcoming monograph