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    Postmaternal, postwork and the maternal death drive

    Baraitser, Lisa (2016) Postmaternal, postwork and the maternal death drive. Australian Feminist Studies 31 (90), pp. 393-409. ISSN 0816-4649.

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    Abstract

    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.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis, available online at the link above.
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
    Depositing User: Administrator
    Date Deposited: 18 Jan 2017 08:38
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:30
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/17958

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