Thinking through childhood and maternal studies: a feminist encounter

Feminism and the Politics of Childhood offers an innovative and critical exploration of perceived commonalities and conflicts between women and children and, more broadly, between various forms of feminism and the politics of childhood. This unique collection of 18 chapters brings into dialogue authors from a range of geographical contexts, social science disciplines, activist organisations, and theoretical perspectives. The wide variety of subjects include refugee camps, care labour, domestic violence and childcare and education. Chapter authors focus on local contexts as well as their global interconnections, and draw on diverse theoretical traditions such as poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, posthumanism, postcolonialism, political economy, and the ethics of care. Together the contributions offer new ways to conceptualise relations between women and children, and to address injustices faced by both groups

Chapter 11 Watchful Waiting

This paper opens up the relationship between vulnerability and the temporalities of care. It takes ‘care’ as not just a material practice that supports, manages and sustains vulnerable bodies, but as a temporal practice, one that produces time in situations that are otherwise felt to be stuck or ‘chronic’. It draws on some co-written anecdotes about the use of ‘watchful waiting’ by medical practitioners working in general practice in the UK’s National Health System (NHS) to think through the meanings of waiting in relation to chronic health and mental health crises. The offer of ‘watchful waiting’ as a response to ‘chronic crisis’ becomes a test case for understanding a more general condition of watchful waiting as a form of care, in a context in which waiting for healthcare has become an agony for many, experienced as a form of abandonment or a key sign of health service failure. The paper attempts to re-think ‘waiting times’ within a wider history of the temporalities of care, in order to elucidate the ways an offer of waiting can itself be understood as a response to vulnerability through a practice of staying with or alongside the chronic temporalities of others

Chapter 5 Depressing time

The Time of Anthropology provides a series of compelling anthropological case studies that explore the different temporalities at play in the scientific discourses, governmental techniques and policy practices through which modern life is shaped. Together they constitute a novel analysis of contemporary chronopolitics. The contributions focus on state power, citizenship, and ecologies of time to reveal the scalar properties of chronopolitics as it shifts between everyday lived realities and the macro-institutional work of nation states. The collection charts important new directions for chronopolitical thinking in the future of anthropological research

The effect of undernutrition on brain-rhythm development

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Introduction. Clinical encounters in sexuality: psychoanalytic practice & Queer Theory, Eds., Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson.

In 2017, Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson brought out a landmark edited collection entitled Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice & Queer Theory with the open-access, nonprofit publisher Punctum Books. This issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality gathers a range of responses from scholars and clinicians to the book. To introduce the issue, I offer some thoughts, inspired by Bion, on “encounter.

Postmaternal, postwork and the maternal death drive

The term ‘postmaternal’ has recently emerged as a way to articulate the effects of neoliberalism on the public devaluing of caring labour [Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press]. This term suggests a valorisation of values associated with care and mothering that have traditionally been gendered and rely on a heterosexist matrix for their intelligibility. Marxist feminist writers during the 1970s struggled with the question of the particular form of care that reproduction entails, and this feminist archive has been recently extended to a discussion of ‘post-work’ [Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke], in which calls for the valuing of unpaid work as a viable form of labour have been reanimated. In this article I examine the relation between these two analytic categories – ‘postmaternal’ and ‘postwork’. Both categories require that we re-think some of the most trenchant issues in feminist thought – the sexual division of labour, the place of ‘reproduction’ in psychic and social life, and the possibilities for a new feminist commons

‘Time’ for ‘the People’: reflections on ‘Psychoanalysis for the People: Free Clinics and the Social Mission of Psychoanalysis’

This article offers some reflections on two important conferences held at the Freud Museum in London during 2021, which has resulted in the publication of a remarkable special issue of Psychoanalysis and History. The conferences aimed at providing a new space to re-engage a long history of debate, started by Freud himself, about psychoanalysis as not only a form of mental health treatment, and a theory of mind, but a social and political project aimed at emancipation. Descriptions of pioneering ‘social clinics’ from São Paulo to south London that maintain psychoanalytic thinking about social suffering, and offer psychoanalysis as a critical analytic tool to understand such suffering, render these projects ‘psychosocial’. The article reflects on the temporal nature of these clinics – their particular uses of time as part of healing, as well as their temporariness that is linked to the precarity of projects that are often underfunded, and rely on the passion and commitment of founders, practitioners and patients. Somehow many of them ‘stagger on’, contributing to the preservation of the social mission of psychoanalysis, started over 100 years ago. The author offers a perspective from the ‘Waiting Times’ research project that investigates the relation between time and care, by turning to Isabelle Stengers’s ‘care of the possible’ as a way to conceptualize the work of these psychoanalytic social clinics