Feminist Reflections on the Scope of Labour Law: Domestic Work, Social Reproduction and Jurisdiction

Drawing on feminist labour law and political economy literature, I argue that it is crucial to interrogate the personal and territorial scope of labour. After discussing the “commodification” of care, global care chains, and body work, I claim that the territorial scope of labour law must be expanded beyond that nation state to include transnational processes. I use the idea of social reproduction both to illustrate and to examine some of the recurring regulatory dilemmas that plague labour markets. I argue that unpaid care and domestic work performed in the household, typically by women, troubles the personal scope of labour law. I use the example of this specific type of personal service relation to illustrate my claim that the jurisdiction of labour law is historical and contingent, rather than conceptual and universal. I conclude by identifying some of the implications of redrawing the territorial and personal scope of labour law in light of feminist understandings of social reproduction

Talking to the Shameless?: Sexual Violence and Mediation in Intrastate Conflicts

To what extent, does sexual violence influence the likelihood of conflict management in intrastate conflicts? Despite a growing body of research that explores conflict-related sexual violence, the literature presents little insight on its effects on conflict resolution. Extending feminist international relations (IR) theory to intrastate conflicts and applying a gender lens to the power to hurt argument, I argue that when rebel sexual violence is public knowledge, the likelihood of conflict management increases because the state perceives it as a threat to its masculinity. I systematically test this argument on all intrastate conflict years from 1990 to 2009 using the Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict and the Civil War Mediation data set. The results provide robust support for the argument. This presents an important refinement of traditional rationalist conflict bargaining theories and opens new avenues for the research and practice of conflict management

Family matters in racial logics: Tracing intimacies, inequalities, and ideologies

This article seeks to advance our understanding of how intimate relations and racial logics are co-constituted and matter - subjectively, culturally, materially, and politically - in our colonial present of economic inequalities, nationalist populisms, anti-migrant discourses and xenophobic hostilities. Addressing these crisis conditions is urgent, yet critical interventions indicate that prevailing accounts inadequately address the scale, complexity, and fluidity of racisms operating today. This article proposes to think racial logics 'otherwise' by drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship and intersectional analytics to produce a genealogy of state/nation formation processes, imperial encounters, and legitimating ideologies that illuminates how 'intimacy builds worlds'.(1) A deep history of political centralisation reveals that regulation of intimate, familial relations is a constitutive feature of successful state-making and crucial for understanding how modernity's 'race difference' is produced and how the racialisation of 'Other' ('non-European', undesirable) sexual/familial practices figures in contemporary crises. Locating intimate relations - 'family' - in (birthright) citizenship, immigration regimes, and political-economic frames helps clarify the amplification of global inequalities and the power of stigmatisations to fuel nationalist attachments and anti-migrant hostilities. Foregrounding intimacy and integrating typically disparate lines of inquiry advances our analyses of today's often opaque yet intense racisms and their globally problematic effects.This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Critical privilege studies: Making visible the reproduction of racism in the everyday and international relations

Immediate accessThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

State/Nation Histories, Structural Inequalities and Racialised Crises

This paper draws attention to blind spots in understandings of 'the state' in International Political Economy. A genealogy of political centralisation that begins not with modern but the earliest (ancient) states reveals the requisites of successful state formation and how these constitute structural inequalities with enduring effects. Stark inequalities within and between nations figure in producing and exacerbating myriad problems, even global crises. I focus here on how economic inequalities are historically shaped by and today are variously reproducing racial logics that percolate through and exacerbate a global rise in xenophobia, alt-right nationalisms and anti-migrant hostilities. I trace linkages among inheritance, birthright citizenship, economic 'gaps' and immigration policies to reveal racial logics shaping the practices, policies and institutions of today's global political economy. Historically, my broad-stroke survey illuminates how states - through coercion, regulation and legitimation - produce and sustain the social violence of intersecting structural inequalities, and how we are 'blinded' to this by normalisation of ideologies that both reproduce and mask operations of power. Methodologically, my account argues that in a state-based system, 'economic' inequalities are never simply that, but always (though variously and complexly) produced by and producing racialised, sexualised and geopolitically differentiated inequalities.Leverhulme Trust18 month embargo; published 24 November 2020This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]