Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

373

Precarity and Gender in the Era of Neoliberal Globalization

RC32 Women in Society (host committee)

Language: English

Increasingly social theorists and analysts are using the concept of precarity, in particular self-precarization and governmental precarization (Isabel Lorey), to discuss the impact of the neoliberal policies on workers in Europe and the US.  Theorists like Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant also theorize precarity as a relational concept, an ontological condition of human vulnerability. Yet, most of these theorizations trace the genealogy of the term to its Western European and US context.
In this session we begin with the feminist theorizations, particularly in the Third World, of women’s vulnerability in the “informal” economy or “micro economy” (Mary Osiim) as the starting point to trace an alternative trajectory and then address the ways in which this precarity has changed for women in the contemporary global conjuncture.
In particular, we seek papers that pay attention to how issues of race, immigration, gender, and class complicate how precarity is experienced by women and men in the Global North and South, the various strategies, individual and collective, that women and men employ to organize against/resist both economic and relational precarity, and how that might contribute to new theorizations of a more inclusive understanding of various forms of precarity. Posters: