CFP - Beyond the Gendered Division of Labour: MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory

Beyond the Gendered Division of Labour: Changing Care (MANCEPT 2024 Workshop)

Women still take on the bulk of care labour both in and outside of the labour market. Yet the gendered division of labour by no means exhausts the care crisis that Western societies face. Recent upheavals to Western family structures (from the mass entry of women into the labour market, to the legalisation of queer marriage) have barely challenged the privatisation of reproductive labour in the nuclear family or its idealization. This workshop seeks to explore feminist approaches to care, housework and the family which critically examine the privatisation of reproductive labour and move beyond distributional frameworks of justice. In addition, the workshop aims to ask how we should ideally organise care and housework.

We invite proposals of no more than 400 words, for a presentation of approximately 20 minutes. We aim to facilitate discussion on changing care structures in and outside of the private sphere. We especially welcome contributions with a focus on social structures, ideology, and theories of social change, as well as papers that engage with historical experiments of living and the organisation of care in non-Western societies. We invite submissions from both normative and historical perspectives. Academics at any career stage are welcome to apply. We welcome in-progress work and seek to foster a friendly and collaborative environment. We are also receptive to interdisciplinary explorations of these ideas, provided they are accessible to the non-specialist. Here is a non-exclusive list of some indicative themes:

• The privatization of reproductive labour within the family
• The commodification of reproductive labour & global care chains
• State provision of reproductive labour
• Justice and the restructuring of care
• Public and private childrearing practices
• Social reproduction under and after capitalism
• Alternatives to the nuclear family (across cultures, past times, and utopias)
• Family, kinship, and anti-racist struggle
• The value of the private sphere
• Caring in a post-work world
• Transforming domestic spaces
• Moral and legal obligations in family law
• The (wrong of the) gendered division of labour

Please email your anonymized abstract (no more than 400 words) and, in a separate sheet, your name, affiliation (if any), email address and a short bio to [email protected] AND [email protected]. Please submit your proposal before June 14th 2024. Successful applicants will be notified within the following week.

If you are a graduate student, MANCEPT has a small number of fee-waiver bursaries for which you can apply after acceptance (the deadline is June 28th). 

Convenors: Livia von Samson (HU Berlin), Rebecca Clark (Oxford University)