What do wages do? Feminist theory in austere times
Part of the Gender Institute 2014 Public Lecture Series, Feminist Theory Now
Speaker's abstract: What can money do? Can it be put to work to address deepening forms of social and economic inequality associated with the global financial crisis, recession and still unfolding politics of austerity? Can we have faith in money as an injustice remedying substance in a crisis ridden and (yet still) thoroughly financialized reality?
While the latter scenario is implied in recent feminist calls to redistribute resources to redress widening socio-economic inequalities, in this talk I suggest that such a redistributive logic fails to account for the shifting capacities of resources, including the capacities of money. To track these shifting capacities, I revisit the demands of the 1970s women’s liberation movement and especially the assumptions at play in these demands that money both measure and distribute justice. While these assumptions were arguably politically efficacious in that moment, in the contemporary present pervasive financialization has involved a material transformation to the capacities of money, a transformation which, I will suggest, leaves its justice distributing potential in doubt. In this talk I call therefore not only for a careful exploration of the capacities of resources in analyses of crisis, recession and austerity, but also for feminist theory to rethink redistributive justice in the light of such transformations. Central to these considerations is money in the wages form.
Lisa Adkins is the BHP Billiton Chair of Sociology at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and was previously Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Widely published in the areas of social theory, feminist theory and economic sociology her recent research focuses on the restructuring of labour and shifts to the economy-society relation in post-Fordist capitalism. Publications from this research have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Feminist Theory, NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research and Australian Feminist Studies. She has also recently contributed to debates concerning the reconstruction of social science through the volumes What is the Empirical? (co-edited with Celia Lury) and Measure and Value (co-edited with Celia Lury). She is convenor of the international research network New Times: Transforming Feminist Political Economies. From 2015 she will be co-editor (with Maryanne Dever) of Australian Feminist Studies.
Light refreshments wil be served following the lecture
