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

围绕无偿劳动的历史和持续贬值，工人阶级妇女处于当代辩论的核心。联合政府（2010- 2015）和保守党政府（2015-）推出的经济紧缩措施取消了对不稳定和低薪女工的社会福利支持，取而代之的是促进“紧缩”和“节俭”的家庭管理（Orgad和De Benedictis， 2015: 419）。自2020年以来，政府称赞护士、护理人员和清洁工（都是女性主导的职业）是正在进行的Covid-19大流行的“英雄”，这场大流行已成为一场“护理危机”，这突显了英国在社会经济上对女性劳动力的依赖（Chatzidakis et al ., 2020: 889）。学校关闭和“在家工作”的规定模糊了工作场所和家庭之间的界限，而在减少/改变工作时间的选择方面表现最差的工薪阶层女性，正在“承担”越来越多的无偿工作量（Lyonette等人，2021:4）。女权主义活动家和学者正在通过想象无数重新评估和重新分配性别无偿劳动的方法来应对“护理危机”，从恢复福利国家到废除核心家庭（Chatzidakis et al 2020, Weeks, 2011, Lewis, 2019）。通过与这些女权主义者的想象对话，该项目考察了与日常生活单调相关的文化出口：即社交媒体、肥皂剧和真人秀，并提出了这样一个问题：对工人阶级妇女无偿劳动的中介表现与她们的生活经历有何不同？在何种程度上，以何种方式，这些主流叙事受到了抵制？

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?