New issue| DWF - Diversamente occupate, 2010, n. 1 (85) |
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 MATERIA
POLIEDRA
SELECTA
EDITORIAL MATERIA What about work? Through a multiple voices dialogue, a group of young women reflects on meaning of work in their life. What emerges is that work is overall an urgency, a dimension within we can try to measure needs and desires, a surrogate of public space, but too often it is not up the expectations. In fact authors’ impression about work is that there is a gap between labour market and expressivity. In other words, feminization didn’t mean a transformation of work in a dimension for women, but on the contrary it meant an expropriation of their skills. At the same time, authors don’t think that putting themselves aside is a sign of freedom. What are thus the practices for taking back ourselves at work? Between fullness and emptiness. A genealogy There is a certain discontinuity in feminist theory of 1970s about work. Author tries thus to discuss nowadays with women that were part of that movement and that are still active in politics, looking for the reasons for the sitting aside of that issue. What emerges is a reflection about feminist contribution on public debates about work. On this basis author can also try to analyze what is work today, that is, an analysis about investment in the private sphere and dispersion of critical potential, that constitute the risk of “take to the market”. Young women’s time Spanish historian tells about her study about women’s employment, that made her famous in Italy trough the book Strategie di Libertà (2000), pioneer text for a reading of what in 1970s has been defined feminization of work. Beginning from this text, after ten years, author opens the dialogue with male subject that she considers in crisis as fordist system of production. Author speaks about crisis in two ways: as an opportunity to redefine it, or as a risk of coming back to old models. About women’s theories of work author says: “I think it’s time to move from theory and from reflection about work, to politics”. From reflection to politics, through history This is a reflection about timing dimension for young women starting from her book Sociologie del tempo (2009), drawing attention to the concern of time as a crucial concern in the so called “society of acceleration” and of his citizenship. Since the peculiar plurality of feminine timing, to the border dimension, to the “extent present” strategy, author analyzes the relationship between youngwomen and their different temporal dimensions. Whether they can win back time only starting from daily time, Leccardi makes some concrete proposals: to open a dialogue between men and women and to rediscover solidarity, hoping to create a biographic narrations that can express subjectivity. POLIEDRA
“Theoretically and historically, the central criterion for citizenship has been ‘independence’, and the elements encompassed under the heading of independence have been based on masculine attributes and abilities. Men, but not women, have been seen as possessing the capacities required of ‘individuals’, ‘workers’ and ‘citizens’. As a corollary, the meaning of ‘dependence’ is associated with all that is womanly –and women’s citizenship in the welfare state is full of paradoxes and contradictions”: the Italian translation of the classical essay by Carole Pateman.
The writer analyses the link between two aspects of work: its womanizing and its cognitive turn. On one side, women bring along qualitative skills that did not belong to the working field before, while, on the other side, men experience types of underemployment, once typical of women’s world. Due also to temporary jobs, both processes imply dedicating to work more energies than the labour market actually acknowledges, and transforming work as productive activity onto a meaning-creating activity. According to the writer, the analysis of these new forms should lead to a new evaluation of the power of life, that is, to the claim for a bio-income liberating each one from the bonds of economic productivity.
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