The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract: Working and Living in Contingency [Hardcover]

This collection analyzes shifting relationships between gender and labour in post-Fordist times. Contingency creates a sexual contract in which attachments to work, mothering, entrepreneurship and investor subjectivity are the new regulatory ideals for women over a range of working arrangements, and across classed and raced dimensions.

What does the sexual contract look like in times of contingency and precarity? How is contemporary post-Fordist capitalism rewriting the regulatory ideals of earlier eras? These are questions that the contributors set out to answer in this challenging and provocative collection which ranges from migrant workers to mommy bloggers and the affective attachments of academics. A fascinating and compelling collection that will be a must-read for anyone interested in work and life today. - Rosalind Gill, City University, UK

Conventional experiences and depictions of work and employment and the worker and non-worker self are falling away. We are aware of the norms that have been lost, but we are still only starting to explore how to understand what is emergent, both in the nature of the worker, labour, the self and the home. It is a change that has consistent social drivers for change, expressed in the emergence of forms of contractualism that are individualised but where compliance implies particular social and sexual identities. Exploring these diverse experiences and their contradictions is the means by which understand the complex dimensions of that contractualism. This book is an outstanding combination of theoretical innovation and analysis of particular gender and race experiences of change. It is a statement of how to proceed analytically. In combination, the studies in this collection will contribute enormously to our understanding of social change in work, employment labour and home. - Dick Bryan, University of Sydney, Australia

The last thirty-five years have been ones of profound sol³$