2018-19 Excluded Voices and Suppressed Narratives

Unblinding Justice for Social Change

Speaker: Professor Emily Grabham (University of Kent)

Title: The Sexual Contract is a Cosmic Gamble: Law, Fate, and World-Making in the Lives of Women in Precarious Work

Abstract:

'As I signed the contract and looked at it I was kind of like well, okay, I am a bank worker and I don’t know what that means. I moved here on 5th September in 2012 and (work) started shortly after that … I looked at the hours and the amount and I was like that is extremely disappointing, but right now, I’m in the crunch, I have nothing else, I’ll take it and we’ll see where we go. (Zero hours worker).'

After the vibrant and oppositional thinking of second wave feminist approaches to labour, we might understandably feel bemused at the tepidness of some contemporary legal initiatives on work and care. Where second wave feminists fought for 'wages for housework' and critiqued the 'sexual contract', contemporary feminists find ourselves discussing 'work-life balance' and making requests for 'flexible work'. In this lecture, I will draw on recent fieldwork to discuss how the law and rhetoric of 'flexibility' fails women who try to perform unpaid care for others while working in precarious jobs. I argue that keeping our eyes on the 'sexual contract' helps us to make sense of these failures. Yet in retaining the far-sightedness and trenchant political critique that Carole Pateman brought to her account of the 'sexual contract', we need also to account for women's experiences of bargaining with fate when choosing or remaining in precarious work.

Working through the unsteady, capricious temporalities of life lived under and through the sexual contract, and through ‘real’ legal contracts, this lecture draws on 35 in depth interviews between 2015 and 2017 with women across the mainland UK working under a range of ‘non-standard’ contracts whilst performing unpaid care responsibilities. Often eschewing language of ‘flexibility’ or ‘balancing’ work and care, these women instead related stories about life and death, survival, thriving, and fate alongside decisions made to accept, negotiate or submit to contractual terms.One of the strongest themes is that managing paid work alongside unpaid care is often lived as fateful and chaotic, akin to what Neferti Tadiar (2012) would term a ‘cosmic gamble’, and many worlds away from the ‘orderly career’ imagined by UK legal and policy discourse on ‘family-friendly employment rights’. Unpaid care was about shepherding transitions into and out of life, or from independence into disablement and death, in the knowledge that the stage these women workers were in right now would soon be superseded by another difficult transition. In the face of these fundamental experiences of fate-playing, terms we find in current legal and policy debates - such as ‘balance’ and ‘flexibility’ - simply do not cut it, descriptively or analytically. The decisions these women had to make about meagre hours (and pay) or intermittent contracts were experienced as a ‘cosmic gamble’, a game of high stakes that could not be avoided. Aiming, then, for a fine-grained account of the role of legal contracts in these women’s fate-playing experiences, I argue in this paper that what Tadiar terms the ‘remaindered lives’ of global capital are legally as well as politically or economically achieved. Returning to the lived experience of encountering, wrangling with, or being beholden to the fateful workings of legal contracts provides feminist scholars with an essential route for understanding how remaindering operates in the world of work.

 

We live in a hugely polarised world in which, for many, life has become longer and better than in any other time whereas, for many others, it is still “nasty, brutish and short.” Even those who would supposedly fall into the privileged side of the divide increasingly feel their lives and the world are getting worse, not better. They point to the rise in inequality experienced almost everywhere in the world in the past few decades, the growth of suffering and displacement in bloody conflicts, the migration and refugee crisis, the resilient brutality and corruption of authoritarian regimes, and the ever more visible effects of environmental destruction and climate change.     

The 2018-2019 Signature Lectures at the Transnational Law Institute at King’s College London are dedicated to these broad topics of inclusion and exclusion and, in particular, to the longstanding contention that law is both complicit and instrumental in silencing critique and empowering resistance and change. Cloaked in transcendent principles of universality, law should be and often is able to help, but also often fails the most vulnerable, most marginalised and most disempowered people.

This failure is often of law’s implementation, but also of law’s blindness and deafness to the plight of vulnerable groups, whose stories are rarely told and heard.

Building on the approach of KTLS18 (www.transnationallawsummit.org) we are inviting not only legal scholars, but academics, thinkers and doers from all quarters to join the debate and help us uncover and publicise the suppressed stories that may lead to legal developments and social change.

The 2018-2019 lectures are made possible by the generous gift of Sir Dickson Poon in support of the Transnational Law Institute and are open to the interested public.

All events are followed by a reception.