ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

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Bodies in Waiting

Reflecting on the burgeoning field of feminist media histories and contemporary debates around Shanta Apte’s films, protests, and writing, along with sources that bring narratives from different women in the film industry, this paper argues that such discussions enable us to rethink questions of gender, creative labour, characteristics of film work, and the industrial milieu. This permits a shift in the focus of study to subjects of waiting, legal battles, and writing and considers evolving labour geographies produced by the migration of cine-workers to examine the problems of creative labour.

How Much Time Is Too Much Time?

The fi erce debates surrounding the issue of unpaid domestic labour in the 21st century have resulted in political parties promising to monetise the work undertaken by housewives in India. The recent “Time Use in India 2019” report released by the National Statistical Offi ce adds to the discourse that problematises the disproportionate differences in domestic division of labour between women and men. This article uses the larger fi ndings of the NSO survey to probe the pattern of time-use at the national and state level that may be explained by pre-existing gender norms and behaviours.

The Macro Frames of Microwork

Based on a qualitative study of women microworkers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, this paper explores the gendered modus operandi of global platform capitalism. For women from households negotiating caste and class status in small-town South India, digital labour platforms like AMT are the optimal choice; an answer to both economic necessity and familial validation. Women must, however, endure the platform’s coercive disciplining, striving to meet its unknowable metrics. With the pandemic, even as they are forced to contend with the oppressive precarity of digital labour—reducing job availability, falling pay, longer hours and the risk of suspension—work on AMT, paradoxically, becomes non-negotiable. The artificial intelligence-based regimes of the platform economy urgently need a norm shift towards gender equality and redistributive justice.

 

Will COVID-19 Hamper Strides towards Gender Equality in Ireland?

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the fragility of global advances towards gender equality, thus foregrounding the inherent difficulty of achieving sustained progress within the constraints of a patriarchal system. In this paper, we explore this issue in greater depth, focusing on Ireland, widely heralded as a progressive and increasingly secular state, but one still steeped in patriarchal norms enshrined in the Constitution. Accounting for the influence of this foundational document, we examine women’s economic participation, including the impact of the pandemic response, and domestic violence. This paper argues that the pandemic response has reinforced Ireland’s patriarchal structure, stalling, and, in some cases, threatening progress towards gender equality.

 

COVID-19 and Women’s Labour Crisis: Reiterating an Inclusive Policy Response

The covid-19 pandemic in India has had an unequal impact on women in a number of ways. In terms of economic opportunity, it has been seen that more women lost jobs compared to men and fewer have been able to rejoin labour force. This is in the context of gendered labour markets where female labour force participation has been low and declining. This paper presents an analysis of the situation of women’s employment pre-lockdown and some indications on what the impact of Covid-19 could be, based on microstudies and other literature available. Further, the adequacy of the social protection and employment generation programmes of the government that are specifically aimed at improving female labour force participation is assessed.

 

The Continuing Saga of Women’s Work during COVID-19

This paper employs a social reproduction framework to argue that the two main institutions of capitalism—the markets and the state—have failed to adequately provide for the working people of India during the pandemic while fostering gender inequities. While the demand for gender equity in the domestic sphere and the workplace is not new, the pandemic further underscores its urgency.

 

Women at Work

This paper discusses the nature of the fish processing industry in India, focusing on issues concerning the migrant women workforce specifically. The fish processing industry employs migrant women workers on contract in almost all parts of the country. A detailed questionnaire was used to elicit information from the workers and the data collected have been supplemented with detail derived from observation and informal discussions with women workers. Information from the villages from where the women are recruited and from discussions with their friends, neighbours and relatives also forms a major part of the database.

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