| Kommentar |
'Work' and 'the worker' are not neutral categories. Who gets to be a worker, what kind of activities count as work, what type of work people have access to and what working conditions they encounter, crucially depend on aspects like their gender, their race, their age, or their ability. In this class we will look at work from an intersectional feminist perspective and deal with questions such as: which actives count as work and why? What are the normative concerns raised by issues like the gender division of labour, the lack of valuation of care-work, new forms of precarious labour in the gig economy or the criminalization of sex work? On which grounds can workers who are differently positioned form solidarity and resist unjust work arrangements? We will discuss these and other questions by drawing on work in Marxist- and socialist-feminist theory, the ethics of care and affective labour, theories of freedom and alienation, and theories of (transnational) solidarity. We will also study specific cases and the issues they raise, including care platforms, automation, transnational supply chains, global care chains. |
