Decolonizing work: Unpacking the gendered-colonial distinctions between work from home and domestic work

Banday, Muneeb Ul Lateef; Dixit, Anukriti (14 September 2023). Decolonizing work: Unpacking the gendered-colonial distinctions between work from home and domestic work (Unpublished). In: Swiss Association of Gender studies conference 2023.

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Domestic work is nearly always assumed to not ‘directly’ contribute to an economy. The ‘economy’ of a country is in fact produced through the lens of ‘paid vs. unpaid’ work – where only paid work contributes to the GDP. The very construction of ‘economics’ is therefore predicated on leaving a crucial, formative and imperative form of labour – namely domestic work – outside the purview of what is considered ‘paid’ or ‘breadwinning’ (interview with Brigid Schulte, NPR, 2020). The Covid -19 pandemic provides us with a unique window to find alternate articulations for ‘domestic work’. ‘Work from home’ became a norm during this pandemic, with companies paying employees to do ‘paid’ and ‘economic’ activity from their homes – thus making ‘home’ a legible and categorical space for ‘work’. Even with the attention focused on the household however, housework is still largely delegitimized as not belonging to ‘work’. This paper follows an account of academic scholarship produced on gendered labour during the Covid-19 pandemic to reiterate that what we consider ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ scholarship makes two epistemically violent moves. For one, it relegates domestic work as ‘chores’ (Deshpande, 2021), as ‘unpaid’ labour (Haney and Barber, 2022; Zamberlan et al., 2021) and inside a ‘breadwinning-homemaking’ binary (Aladsani, 2022; Giordano, 2020). Secondly, academic scholarship, in keeping with the ‘separate spheres’ model of ‘work’, attempts to push ‘Work from Home’ into the forays of ‘remote work’ (Mendrika et al., 2021), ‘telecommuting’ (Lyttelton et al., 2022) and ‘virtual work’ (Maurer et al., 2022; Karl et al., 2022) in a move to retain the separate contouring of boundaries of ‘work’ vs. ‘domestic chores’. We wish to counter-posit these knowledges against feminist decolonial knowledges that illustrate the importance of unionized domestic work (Acciari & Pero, 2020) in an attempt to ‘de-precaritise’ domestic work (Guttierez-Rodriguez, 2010) and recognize the ‘home’ as a sphere of action for the (in)formal capitalist economy (Boeri, 2018). In this process, we aim to reveal how gendered colonial discourses of work produce distinctive boundaries between domestic work and work from home eschewing the blurred boundaries between them.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	09 Interdisciplinary Units > Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies (ICFG)
UniBE Contributor:	Banday, Muneeb Ul Lateef, Dixit, Anukriti
Subjects:	300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology
Language:	English
Submitter:	Anukriti Dixit
Date Deposited:	19 Apr 2024 14:05
Last Modified:	19 Apr 2024 14:05
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Work from home, domestic work, decoloniality, intersectionality
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/196106