Gender and Labour in New Times

Book excerpt: This book is concerned with the gender order of post-Fordism, and especially the labour demanded from many women by post-Fordist capitalism. It maps and traces these demands as well their entanglement in complex processes of value creation. In so doing the contributors elaborate how processes of financialization; calls for work-readiness; new modes of economic calculation; processes of economization, and emergent regulatory strategies are reconfiguring labour and life in post-Fordism and summoning new forms of ‘women’s work’. Contributors also map how these same processes are repositioning feminism, especially feminism as a mode of critique. Feminism here stands not in an external relation to the objects and matters it seeks to critique but as implicated in those very objects. In mapping this terrain Gender and Labour in New Times opens out new feminist research agendas for the study of the post-Fordist labour and the modes of regulation that post-Fordism as a regime of capital accumulation entails. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Feminist Studies.