JSI Seminar | Bringing law back in: Theorizing the role of law in shaping the social reproduction bargain

In-person event

A rich interdisciplinary feminist project spanning the fields of critical political economy, feminist economics, geography, migration, sociology and social policy has long sought to theorize and make visible the role social of reproduction and reproductive labour in sustaining both life and labour power, and its transformations, ‘depletions’ and ‘crises’ in post-Fordist life. With some notable exceptions, however, much of the intensive feminist attention upon social reproduction has taken place outside of legal scholarship. This might be attributed to several general factors: a dearth of materialist-informed approaches in feminist legal theory, legal feminists’ liberal orientations towards work, and a greater focus on unpaid care in the family, rather than paid reproductive labours performed in the market. In addition, non-legal disciplines have, for their part, been routinely less concerned with the role of law in their accounts of social reproduction, leaving the role of law in shaping the social reproduction bargain undertheorized.

This seminar paper maps a legal feminist approach to social reproduction theory. In doing so, it articulates the constitutive and distributional role of law in shaping markets in reproductive labours, focusing specifically on paid care and domestic work. Attention to law is important because when we focus on law’s distributional and disciplinary outcomes we can begin to imagine how different legal rules might shape them otherwise.

About the speaker:

Angela Kintominas

Angela Kintominas is a lecturer at the Faculty of Law and Justice, UNSW Sydney where she teaches labour law. Her research interests lie in feminist and critical approaches to work, gender, migration and social reproduction. She is particularly interested in the intersection between social security/welfare state law, labour law and migration law in producing gender (and other) inequalities. Her research has focused on forms of gendered, informal and reproductive labour including care and domestic work, au pairing and surrogacy, as well as the platformization of care and domestic work in the gig economy, family migration and transnational family life, and the human and labour rights of migrant workers.

Thursday 23 November 2023, 6-7.30pm AEDT

Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1.5

This event is proudly presented by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at The University of Sydney Law School.