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Oral Presentation Session
Reviewed by: Society for Medical Anthropology
Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities
Primary Theme: Labor
Secondary Theme: Biologies
This session’s aim is to engender a discussion between scholars working on different forms of reproductive labor in post-socialist contexts, such as parents, caregivers, sex workers, surrogate mothers and ova donors. The robust body of literature on social reproduction, feminization of labor and migration, and commoditization of the female reproductive bodies, intimacies and labors, has shown how the neoliberal restructuring of the global economy since the late 1970's resulted in the emergence of the transnational feminized service industries. This panel examines these new forms of unacknowledged waged reproductive labor outsourced from Western Europe and North America to the post-Soviet countries in the Eastern Europe. Drawing on the feminist intellectual tradition that rejects the separation between the domains of production and reproduction, it invites papers that explore how the intimate labor in the post-socialist contexts, including domestic, emotional, sexual and reproductive activities, is foundational for the accumulation of capital and value generation.
The list of topics that could be key to the discussion: the new sexual division of labour in the post-Fordist economy, commodification of women's bodies, intimate relations, affective labors in the post-socialist contexts, institutionalized production and global exchange of affect, sex, care and reproduction, cultures, technologies, and politics of care, Eastern European women, migration and reproductive labor, new forms of kinship, relatedness and sociality mediated by the market, gift vs. commodity, love vs. money rhetorics.
Polina Vlasenko
Indiana University
Polina Vlasenko
Indiana University
Polina Vlasenko
Indiana University
Beatriz San Román
AFIN Research Group / Autonomous University of Barcelona
Beatriz San Román
AFIN Research Group / Autonomous University of Barcelona
Dafna Rachok
PhD Student
Indiana University
Karina Vasilevska-Das
University of California, Berkeley/UCSF
Michalina Grzelka
PhD Student and Teaching Assistant
State University of New York at Albany
Amy Speier
Associate Professor
University of Texas, Arlington
Andrea Whittaker
Professor
Monash University