WHEN: Friday, 2 August 2024, 12pm-1pm BST / 4.30pm-4.30pm IST

WHERE: Online (MS Teams)

Seminar speaker:

Panchali Ray is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Gender Studies and Associate Dean (Academics) at Krea University, India. Her monograph “Politics of Precarity: Gendered Subjects and the Health Care Industry in Contemporary Kolkata” (OUP, 2019) focuses on how class, caste and gender influence women’s experience of labour in the nursing profession. She has since then gone on to work on questions of violence, nationalism and collective politics and edited a volume, “Women Speak Nation: Gender, Culture, and Politics” (Routledge, 2020). Currently, she is engaged in ethnographic research on riverine lands (char), borders, migration, and care in Bengal, India.

Abstract:

Labour historians have often argued that informality rather than precarity has been a more useful category for understanding labour conditions of the Indian working force. With the exception of a small group of workers in formal manufacturing units, most workers, historically, have grappled with insecure work contracts, long hours, below minimum wages and exploitative working conditions. Women, however, have been facing segregated labour markets, low wages, and insecure work, even in the heyday of formalization, given that masculinization almost always accompanies modernization. However, in my talk, I will argue for the efficacy of precarity as a conceptual tool to understand a segment of women’s care work, by drawing out the stigma associated with corporeal-affective labour (care work), and how it further leads to precarity of life. I argue that there are historical continuities of gender and caste norms that continue to reproduce certain forms of care work as precarious and compromise the life opportunities and economic and social well-being of the caregiver.

Though paid care work, historically has almost always been precarious, stigmatized, invisibilized and often the lot of working class, lower-caste women, what remains striking is that despite care work being increasingly brought into the market, it has not been touched by the transactional nature of capitalism and instead continues its associations with precarity, femininity and stigma. This is more so when one notes how social reproduction has almost always been women’s labour, more so, and particularly if commodified, the labour of Dalit women. I will argue that a caste-based division of labour plagues the Indian nursing profession and enables multiple hierarchies that at once, draw from the devaluation of care labour as manual, servile and feminine as well as reinforces the invisibility of care as labour, thus intensifying the precarity of the worker.

Download the seminar poster

The Laws of Social Reproduction project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (under grant agreement No. 772946).

For more information about the project, please email Prabha.kotiswaran@kcl.ac.uk.