The gendered impact of the crisis: an autonomist feminist perspective

Daskalaki, Maria, Fotaki, Marianna and Simosi, Maria (2017) The gendered impact of the crisis: an autonomist feminist perspective.

Abstract

The global financial crisis has triggered a dramatic transformation of employment in the weakest Eurozone economies. This is evidenced in deteriorating work conditions, limited employee negotiating power, low pay, zero-hour contracts and most importantly, in periods of prolonged unemployment for the majority of the working populations, especially women. In this article, we focus on the gendered consequences of the crisis and explore how the austerity policies that followed have transformed the everyday lives of women including both their productive and reproductive roles. We examine these issues in the context of Greece, the country with the highest rates of unemployment in Europe and discuss how un(der)employed women narratively construct their future working/non-working lives. Contributing to critical discussions of neoliberal capitalism and recent feminist geography studies (Pollard, 2012; Roberts, 2015), we explore how women’s struggles over social reproduction unfold. Offering a critical analysis of the boundaries of formal and informal, paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive work, our study reveals women’s retreat to reproductive discourses related to unpaid material, affective, physiological labour. We argue that this retreat could potentially signify women’s refusal to become part of the growing precariat and instigate the emergence of new spaces where contemporary struggles over social reproduction and gendered forms of resistance can be explored.

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Contributors

Author: Maria Daskalaki

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