Representations and subjective experiences of working-class women's unpaid labour, feminist resistance, and post-work imaginaries

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Working-class women are at the crux of contemporary debates surrounding the historical and continued devaluation of unpaid labour. Economic austerity measures introduced by the Coalition (2010-15) and Conservative Government (2015-) have dismantled social welfare support for precarious and low-paid women workers, instead promoting 'austere' and 'thrifty' household management (Orgad and De Benedictis, 2015: 419). Since 2020, government praising of nurses, carers, and cleaners (all female-dominated professions) as 'heroes' of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, which has become a 'crisis of care', has highlighted the UK's socio-economic reliance on female labour (Chatzidakis et al, 2020: 889). School closures and 'work from home' regulations have blurred the boundaries between workplace and home, and working-class women, faring worst in terms of options to reduce/alter their working hours, are 'carrying the burden' of the growing unpaid workload (Lyonette, et al, 2021: 4). Feminist activists and scholars are responding to the 'crisis of care' by imagining myriad ways to revalue and redistribute gendered unpaid labour, from rejuvenating the welfare state to abolishing the nuclear family (Chatzidakis et al 2020, Weeks, 2011, Lewis, 2019). Working in dialogue with these feminist imaginaries, this project examines cultural outlets concerned with the humdrum of everyday life: namely social media, soap operas, and reality television, to ask: in what ways do mediated representations of working-class women's unpaid labour differ from their lived experiences? And to what extent, and in what ways, are these dominant narratives being resisted?