Property and women’s alienation from their own reproductive labour

There is an urgent need for reconstructing models of property to make them more women-friendly. However, we need not start from scratch: both ‘canonical’ and feminist authors can sometimes provide concepts which we can refine and apply towards women’s propertylessness. This paper looks in particular at women’s alienation from their reproductive labour, building on Marx and Delphy. Developing an economic and political rather than a psychological reading of alienation, it then considers how the refined and revised concept can be applied to concrete examples in global justice for women: in particular, the commercialisation of embryonic and fetal tissue in the new stem cell technologies

Gender and class in Britain and France

This article examines the treatment of women's oppression in feminist theory, focusing on the engagement of second wave feminists with the concept of class and its relation to gender. This examination is carried out with reference to British and French feminisms, identifying the main trends and shifts that have developed over the last 35 years and noting that while these are undoubtedly influenced by a particular national context they are also shaped by increasing European integration and social, political and cultural exchanges at a global level. The authors find evidence of a number of similarities in the questions that feminist theorists have asked in Britain and France but also demonstrate that there are significant differences. They conclude that areas of convergent theoretical interests will extend along with cross-border flows of peoples and information

Legal Form, Commodities and Reproduction: Reading Pashukanis

This chapter offers a feminist reading of Pashukanis’s legal theory as a contribution to critical evaluation of the relationship between legality, commodification and gender. Contemporary feminist interests in the relationship between legal and non-legal norms, in the role of commodification, and in the limits of gender as a category of analysis, make a re-engagement with Pashukanis timely. For Pashukanis, legal form constitutes subjects as if they have property rights over objects, generates exchange value, and represents differently situated subjects as if they are equal. Here I develop an account of legal form analysis that recuperates Pashukanis’s distinction between legal form and technical regulation, his theorisation of the subject of commodification, and his historical method of form/content analysis. Drawing on this critical reading of Pashukanis, I argue for the development of legal form analysis so as to accommodate the roles of social reproduction and consumption in the generation of care value and use value in commodity-exchanging societies. I illustrate this method by providing a legal form analysis of a conflict in consent rights over the use of genetically related embryos. Such an analysis asks how consent rights would extract care value from the subject’s reproductive wishes, recognise contributions to the development of the embryo, and recognise investments in the future use of that embryo. In this way, legal form analysis provides a reading of legal contributions to the generation of value from human reproductive activities without making assumptions about their gendered content

What really matters? The elusive quality of the material in feminist thought

The concept of the 'material' was the focus of much feminist work in the 1970s. It has always been a deeply contested one, even for feminists working within a broadly materialist paradigm of the social. Materialist feminists stretched the concept of the material beyond the narrowly economic in their attempts to develop a social ontology of gender and sexuality. Nonetheless, the quality of the social asserted by an expanded sense of the material - its 'materiality' - remains ambiguous. New terminologies of materiality and materialization have been developed within post-structuralist feminist thought and the literature on embodiment. The quality of 'materiality' is no longer asserted - as in materialist feminisms - but is problematized through an implicit deferral of ontology in these more contemporary usages, forcing us to interrogate the limits of both materialist and post-structuralist forms of constructionism. What really matters is how these newer terminologies of 'materiality' and 'materialization' induce us to develop a fuller social ontology of gender and sexuality; one that weaves together social, cultural, experiential and embodied practices

Children, family and the state : revisiting public and private realms

The state is often viewed as part of the impersonal public sphere in opposition to the private family as a locus of warmth and intimacy. In recent years this modernist dichotomy has been challenged by theoretical and institutional trends which have altered the relationship between state and family. This paper explores changes to both elements of the dichotomy that challenge this relationship: a more fragmented family structure and more individualised and networked support for children. It will also examine two new elements that further disrupt any clear mapping between state/family and public/private dichotomies: the third party role of the child in family/state affairs and children's application of virtual technology that locates the private within new cultural and social spaces. The paper concludes by examining the rise of the 'individual child' hitherto hidden within the family/state dichotomy and the implications this has for intergenerational relations at personal and institutional levels

Imagined futures: young men's talk about fatherhood and domestic life

As part of an extensive series of interviews about men and masculinity, small groups of 17 to 18-year-old male students were invited to look forward to their future romantic and domestic lives. Their responses were analysed using the approach and methods of discourse analysis in order to examine both the interpretative resources used within their accounts and to look at how the young men attempted to manage the ‘ideological dilemma’ (Billig, Condor, Edwards, Gane, Middleton & Radley, 1988) that was framed by these cultural themes. The analysis describes three such strategies while paying particular attention to the ‘action orientation’(Heritage, 1984) of these constructions. Finally, the paper moves on to discuss, albeit briefly, the broader implications of this research

Affective equality: love matters

The nurturing that produces love, care, and solidarity constitutes a discrete social system of affective relations. Affective relations are not social derivatives, subordinate to economic, political, or cultural relations in matters of social justice. Rather, they are productive, materialist human relations that constitute people mentally, emotionally, physically, and socially. As love laboring is highly gendered, and is a form of work that is both inalienable and noncommodifiable, affective relations are therefore sites of political import for social justice. We argue that it is impossible to have gender justice without relational justice in loving and caring. Moreover, if love is to thrive as a valued social practice, public policies need to be directed by norms of love, care, and solidarity rather than norms of capital accumulation. To promote equality in the affective domains of loving and caring, we argue for a four-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional model of social justice as proposed by Nancy Fraser (2008). Such a model would align relational justice, especially in love laboring, with the equalization of resources, respect, and representation

Peranan Pemahaman Petunjuk Operasional Dalam Program Borland Delphi Dan Keseringan Berlatih Terhadap Kemampuan Mengoperasikan Program Borland Delphi1

The course of Database System includes theory and practice . Consequently the students should master the theory before, they do the practice. The theory is provided by the course with a course book of Borland Delphy programming database system. The Borland Delpy program provides the operational instructions in English. To operate the program then they should understand the instructions. By understanding the instructions hopefully they can operate the program to produce listing of program codes and component graphs. To aquire the skill, they need to practice. The question undert study is which variable plays more significantly in acquiring the skill, their understanding the English instructions or their practice frequency. To find out the answer an ex post facto study was conducted at PGRI University Semarang to undergraduate students majoring in Information Technology Education, PMIPATI Faculty who were taking the course of Database System at semester 3. There were 2 classes with 21 students in each class, 16 of which were included in the study, so there were 32 participants of the study. There were 3 types of data in the study: (1) the data of the students skill in understanding Borland Delhpy Program operational instructions in English, (2) the data of practice frequency, and (3) the data of the mastery of operating Borland Delphy program. The first two data were collected bu using tests, and the third was collected by using a questionairre. It can be concluded from the follow up analyses and the partial correlation coefficient test that ability to understand English instructions in Borland Delphy program had a significant role in the ability to operate it. It was proven by the follow up analysis of t1=5,385>tsig.5%=2,04. It resulted from the course book in Indonesian they used as well as their paying attention to the operational instructionals of the program in English. On the other hand the practice frequency did not significantly contribute to the skill. It was confirmed by the follow up analysis of t2=-0,029<tsig.5% =2,04. It means the less they practice, the less skillful they were in operating the program and in understanding the English instructions of the Borland Delphy program

Exploring the line of descent in the intergenerational transmission of domestic property

While there has been growing interest in the intergenerational transmission of domestic property over recent years—and specifically housing inheritance—the line of descent in this transmission has been ignored. We do not know whether domestic property goes disproportionately to the next generation(s) of men, or to the women, or equally to men and women as the Western bilateral system of descent would dictate. Using published empirical research and data from a sample of Brisbane households, this paper tests an argument proffered by two European sociologists, Delphy and Leonard. They maintain that domestic property goes disproportionately to the next generation(s) of men because of the power of patriarchy. However, the Brisbane data showed that domestic property went roughly equally to the next generations of men and women, suggesting the presence of a bilateral system of descent. Conceptual and theoretical implications arising from this finding, relative to Delphy and Leonard's claim, are examined in the last part ofthe paper.Australian Policy Online (APO)'s Linked Data II project, funded by the Australian Research Council, with partners at the ANU Library, Swinburne University and RMIT