Gender Ideology and the Crisis of Care in Poland

Across Europe and beyond, actors on the nationalist right are instrumentalising the concept of gender for their own political gains. In Poland the incumbent right-wing Law and Justice party, backed by the Catholic Church, demonised LGBT organisations in its recent successful electoral campaign. Adam Ostolski spoke to feminist activist and scholar Agnieszka Graff about why gender politics have become central to Polish politics, taking a step back to analyse how the Right’s scapegoating of gender is a response to the same set of social issues that the Left attributes to neoliberalism, in particular the crisis of care.

Adam Ostolski: Gender politics were central to the recent electoral campaign in Poland – thanks to the nationalist right. As a long-time feminist activist, what do you make of this?

Agnieszka Graff: Gender, in which I would include LGBT and women’s rights, has been discovered by the Right as a mobilising strategy. Law and Justice (PiS) have taken the idea of ‘gender ideology’ from religious right-wing networks. They demonised the idea of gender in their electoral campaign. And this, at least partly, is what got them into power. Four years ago, refugees were the focus but this time it was ‘LGBT ideology’. Just three days before polling day, the public broadcaster showed the pseudo-documentary Inwazja (Invasion), denouncing presumably foreign-funded LGBT organisations as a threat to Polish identity and sovereignty. The dynamic was the same as with refugees in 2015. The Left and the liberal centre are struggling to catch up.

In what way is the opposition struggling with gender and LGBT issues?

The mainstream opposition sees LGBT rights as part of Western civilisation. That gay rights are human rights is on the agenda just like women’s rights are human rights was part of the agenda in the 1990s, if with a certain hesitation. The message is: we respect LGBT people as human beings, we respect their right to demonstrate their views, but we would never go so far as to allow full citizenship, or what they would call ‘marriage privileges’. At times in this year’s electoral campaign, female politicians were used very conservatively by the [liberal-conservative party] Civic Platform. The image of Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, Civic Platform’s candidate for Prime Minister, as a peace-making woman could be seen on posters all around Poland on which she was depicted hugging another woman and looking blissfully non-political. The slogan was ‘Cooperation, no quarrels’.

Hardly a mobilising message…

An emotional, feel-good image that could work as promotion for a soap opera, but not for a large political coalition getting ready to struggle against an authoritarian government. Civic Platform is hopelessly confused as to what gender means and does in politics. They’ve caught on to its importance, but they don’t know how it works.

The Civic Platform’s policy platform supported civil unions but the accompanying image was that of a straight couple. Regarding women’s rights, there was some understanding of the need for accessible contraception but not abortion. (1) Do you think its message was confused?

Abortion is out of the question. Civic Platform still defends the legal status quo despite polling showing that 53 per cent of Polish people want the law to be more liberal. They are, as always, more conservative than the population.

What about Lewica, the coalition of left-wing parties? Are you satisfied with their position on gender issues?

The Left did not prioritise it enough. Their whole campaign was basically about economics. Gender equality and LGBT rights were there somewhere in their programme but pretty far towards the end.


There is a lingering reluctance on the Left and the liberal centre to take gender seriously. The Right has discovered that this is where politics is because it is where powerful social emotions are located.

Perhaps they were trying to attract PiS voters? A recent study by Przemysław Sadura and Sławomir Sierakowski shows that PiS’s grip on power depends on a group of reluctant supporters that support social transfers but that are not necessarily on board with the conservative message, for now.

So the Left emphasised social justice and economic redistribution and downplayed the so-called cultural issues? Wouldn’t the correct strategy to win those people be to make them feel even more uncomfortable about PiS’s exclusionary gender politics? There is a lingering reluctance on the Left and the liberal centre to take gender seriously. They don’t think that this is where politics is. Whereas the Right has discovered that, yes, this is where politics is because it is where powerful social emotions are located.

How does PiS use gender politics then?

They are playing two things at the same time: the polarisation game and the right-wing use of gender as a synonym for chaos and instability, as well as for the colonisation of Poland by the West. They did it before and they have done it again. Scapegoating is part of it. In 2015 they targeted a general category of ‘genderists’ that included sex educators, feminists, and LGBT activists. Now the term ‘gender ideology’ has been replaced by ‘LGBT ideology’, which has some of the same elements but more obviously targets minorities. PiS is looking to achieve is a clear demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that can mobilise their electorate through a sense of anxiety, fear, and moral superiority. It is the classic populist move of polarising and moralising the political scene. Political opponents become not just people who have different views but enemies, and enemies of humanity at that. Enemies of the family and a threat to children – these are the key charges.


PiS is looking to achieve is a clear demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ that can mobilise their electorate through a sense of anxiety, fear, and moral superiority.

What is different to 2015 is an effort to mark the opposition with the stigma of homosexuality. To do this, they are encouraging Polish homophobia. Whether homophobia is growing in Poland is controversial. Some studies show a persistent move towards acceptance over the last 10 years with more people claiming that they know gay people and so on. But other studies show that acceptance has recently fallen. So maybe PiS’s strategy has been successful.

After Rafał Trzaskowski,the mayor of Warsaw, signed the LGBT charter, PiS seized the opportunity as an excuse to brand their political opponents as gay. They are now playing the socially dangerous game of stigmatising a minority. But it’s not the minority that they’re after, it’s the stigma. PiS want leaders of the European coalition opposition to seem like queers, not the queers themselves. They are not actually that interested in queers, just in creating a general sense that there is something queer about the opposition. For those for whom the essence of politics is men being real men, branding one side as fishy, as something that arouses distrust, if not disgust, can actually work.

In your work, you have argued that the concept of gender ideology or LGBT ideology is better understood in a postcolonial framework. Isn’t it also possible to see anti-gender mobilisations as a ‘symbolic glue’ for anti-neoliberalism?

It’s both and they are interconnected. The claim that Elżbieta Korolczukand I have made, in an article called Ebola from Brussels (a slogan we saw at a right-wing anti-gender rally), is that the focus on gender is superseded by a broader idea of Western domination over the East and of financial elites over ordinary people. The two occur simultaneously. In other words, you have the evil elites, who are sometimes but not necessarily associated with Jews and include the UN, the World Health Organization, pharmaceutical companies, Bill and Melinda Gates… and [George] Soros, of course, is a key player. These rich and powerful Western elites are seen as the evil brains behind it all that have manipulated the masses. These ordinary people are associated with Eastern Europe but also, interestingly, with Africa. In some renditions of this anti-gender discourse, it is Africa that is being colonised by genderism.

We believe that this idea is basically ultraconservative language for resistance to late capitalism. They would not use the words ‘capitalism’ or ‘neoliberalism’ but they’re using the term ‘gender’ to refer to many of the same problems that the Left calls neoliberalism: the dissolution of the welfare state and the complete failure of states to redistribute and deliver social justice. From their point of view, the most important aspect is the dissolution of traditional emotional and economic bonds based on family. This dissolution can be seen in high divorce rates, the fact that the elderly in the West are no longer cared for by their children, and, more generally, the fact that care has become a business rather than a matter of course.


This ‘LGBT ideology’ is basically ultraconservative language for resistance to late capitalism.

Gender is the moralistic term the Right uses for these major problems of neoliberalism: the financialisation of care and the care crisis. All the stuff that we call neoliberalism, they call gender. We use the language of economics and political theory to describe this predicament; they use the language of theology and morals. But we are reacting to the same reality.

Andrea Pető, Eszter Kováts, and others have used the term ‘symbolic glue‘ to pinpoint the way opposition to gender allows various brands of conservatives to get together. For example, nationalists from different countries who didn’t normally collaborate now get on quite well. In the 1980s, there was not an international coalition of nationalists. Other people, who you’d expect to be universalists, such as religious fundamentalists – are now willing to collaborate with the far right, despite its xenophobia. This narrative about the evils of gender is the symbolic glue that has brought them together. But if you replace gender with neoliberalism you will find, and it can be frightening, that you agree with them on a lot of issues.

Nancy Fraser describes the phenomenon of ‘progressive neoliberalism’ whereby advances in women’s and minority rights go in hand with the curbing of social rights.

Nancy Fraser went further than saying that these are parallel processes. She explains the ‘elective affinity’ between the two. Several left-wing feminist scholars make this argument and some blame feminists more straightforwardly than others. Hester Eisenstein, in Feminism Seduced, blames Western and especially American feminists for allowing neoliberal solutions to replace emancipation. The free market posing as freedom for women. Fraser is more subtle, but she suggests the same thing. The discourse of anti-genderism goes a step further. It skips the neoliberalism part and says that it’s just feminism. Feminism destroyed the family, feminism destroyed women’s lives, and it destroyed the place of women in society. But the real problem lies in the failure of modern feminism to take the crisis of care seriously.

There is enormous resistance to this argument. When I wrote Mother and Feminist, I was accused of abandoning feminism and becoming conservative. What I was actually touching on is this very dilemma. For women for whom neoliberal emancipation is simply not an option because they have many kids and no skills allowing them to advance professionally, feminism is a curse and not a solution. Feminism solved a number of issues but not the issue of care. It insufficiently addressed the problem of what you do with your baby or with your ageing mother when you go to work. It’s as simple as that.

The gender politics of PiS is not just a cultural mobilisation against gender. It is also a set of policies in the economic sphere. The 500+ universal family allowance has empowered many women in the labour market. (2) The reduction of retirement age, which understandably was criticised by many feminists, was welcomed by most women as a liberating measure. What I see is a government effort to disarticulate the connection between women’s social and liberal rights: to treat the liberal rights like abortion or contraception as a plague, while guaranteeing social rights within the framework of family and nation.

This is what it looks like from a left wing perspective, one that includes both values: redistribution issues, which you called social issues, and choice, freedom of self-determination. But from the ultra-conservative perspective, individual choice is not a value, it is itself the problem. Women are treated as deserving of recognition and redistribution and the 500+ universal allowance is both. It is not a coincidence that it goes to people who have children. It is paying for the effort of giving care, of taking care of future citizens. It’s not just a calculation that women will have more kids if you pay them. People read it, and I read it myself, as finally someone treating care as labour that deserves to be paid for.


The real problem lies in the failure of modern feminism to take the crisis of care seriously. It insufficiently addressed the problem of what you do with your baby or with your ageing mother when you go to work.

But, within the moral universe of the Right, this recognition is due only in the context where having a child is not a choice. Women should be rewarded for their sacrifice to society because it is part of the natural order. This is what women are. They are not individuals who decide to have children. They are members of society whose bodies are the property of that society. Within this view, it makes perfect sense to do both: to ban abortion and limit access to contraception and to give money to women who have children. They receive this money because they’re not free to choose. That’s the philosophy behind it.

Recently, we are seeing a growing mobilisation on both the Right and on the progressive side. The huge pro-choice Black Protests mobilised more women that the feminist movement ever had before. The same with the LGBT movement. Five years ago, equality marches were organised in a few big cities. In 2019, there will be at least 30 of them. What is going on, in your view?

The easy way to frame it is to say that this is a cultural war around the agenda that has been dictated in part by changes in the West such as the introduction of gay marriage in the last decade, as well as by the Right’s hostile takeover of the term ‘gender’. But I prefer to think about it as a strange divergence between young women and young men, because both sides of this culture war are predominantly young. On the progressive side, there is a majority of women and, on the reactionary side, it’s mainly men. Statistics concerning political choices and sympathies are in line with this observation. Over a third of young men declare their willingness to vote for the Right and far right. Over a third of young women claim that they want to vote for the Left. In the centre you have white middle-aged and older people. Poland is no exception in this regard – the same thing is happening in the United States : the sympathisers of the alt-right are predominantly young men and the most active people on the progressive side and in the climate movement are young women.

Gender has become an important political dividing line and this does not fare well for future generations, if I can crack a joke at this juncture. Or at least for heterosexual marriages, because you can imagine happy male couples on the ultra-right and happy lesbian couples on the Left.

What about the Catholic Church? Part of the explanation for PiS’s anti-LGBT stance is that they wanted to defend the church from the odium of child-abuse scandals.

Or that they used the child abuse scandal to exert pressure and enlist the church into their camp. We need to look at what PiS is doing with the church, but also at what the church is doing with PiS. The church has completely lost its way in Poland.

I don’t believe the narrative that holds that the church used to be progressive and pro-democratic before it suddenly swerved right. There has always been a strong nationalist core to the Polish church, but there was also a healthy attitude to deal with politicians of all parties throughout the 1990s, depending on who was in power. Now the church is completely enlisted in the ranks of the populist right. This is not just morally wrong. It is a grave strategic mistake. Because when PiS loses, the church will lose too.

The image of the church is tarnished. Last year the film Clergy, which addresses issues such as child abuse, corruption and alcoholism in the Catholic Church in Poland, was seen by over 5 million people, making it the third most-watched Polish film since 1989. This spring, the documentary Don’t tell anyone by the Siekielski brothers gave visibility to people who were abused by priests in their childhood. Why didn’t this translate into a loss of support for PiS?

Somehow PiS voters were able to disaggregate their support for PiS and their diminishing support for the church. I used to think that Poland was like Ireland. But now I increasingly think that we’re like Italy. There has yet to be an outbreak of paedophilia scandals in Italy. Frankly, I suspect that this has something to do with the willingness on the part of a lot of people to sweep them under the carpet. Not just because they are willing to forgive the church in return for social services such as a beautiful wedding or a beautiful christening, but also because they are – and I say this with heartbreak – they are willing to sacrifice the children: “Life is tough, life is sometimes disgusting, shit happens. Let’s not talk about it.” In Poland, there is a level of resignation in response to the molested child. It’s just one more awful thing in an awful life in general, in the sea of injustice. I keep waiting for rage and it does not happen…

Are there any grounds for hope?

For hope? Always. The Black Protests, of course. Maybe not the protests themselves because their energy seems to have burned itself out. But the young women, the high school girls, for whom this was their first political experience and whose lives were changed, are now entering the stage when you become politically active, when you vote and become engaged. This new generation of women, and there must be hundreds of thousands of them, are going to make a difference. That’s my hope.




1. Poland has some of the most restrictive laws on abortion in Europe, and government-backed proposals to introduce a total ban on abortion in 2016 were abandoned only after mass protests. For more on this, see this interview.

2. The ‘Family 500+’ programme, implemented in April 2016, guaranteed 500 Polish złoty/month (approx. 120 euros) for each second and subsequent child in the family and the same amount for the first child in low-income families. As of July 2019, the benefit has been made fully universal for all children aged 0-17.

Published with the support of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union.

Sex in Colonial Empires and Its Legacy in Europe Today
Published at the end of 2018 and weighing over four kilos, the hefty tome Sexe, race et colonies tackles the question of sexual relations in the colonial era. The importance of colonial empires and the way that, during this period, gender representations were constructed through the prism of “race” have had a considerable impact on the legacy of European cultures. The book’s release sparked major controversy in France due to the numerous images it contained: amongst other things, it was accused of aestheticising the indefensible, of violating the rights of those depicted, of voyeuristic sensationalism, and of being pornographic. The work of historian Christelle Taraud, co-editor of the book, shows the centrality of sex in complex colonial and racial relations. In today’s context of third-wave feminism, it clashes with the thinking on minorities of militant groups in the women’s liberation movements at the time of #MeToo.

Green European Journal: You have for a long time studied women in a colonial context, mainly in North Africa, and have published several books on the subject. How did you start working on this?

Christelle Taraud: For both militant feminist and family history reasons, I really wanted to work on North Africa and women. While looking for a way into this subject, I came across reports by colonial doctors from the interwar years that seemed to indicate that the phenomenon of prostitution had been absolutely massive in French-ruled North Africa. So, my initial PhD research focused on the colonial system for regulating prostitution, but then I realised that prostituted women were for the most part indigenous, and that something was playing out that went beyond just the control and management of poor women’s sexuality.

Furthermore, what was said about these women was very condescending, masculine and white. This system – the colonial regulation of prostitution – had been put in place by men for men: it talked endlessly about women, without women themselves ever being heard. That’s what Michelle Perrot says in her book Les femmes et les silences de l’Histoire:[1] because these women were, as well as being prostitutes in a very whorephobic world, not just women, but also poor and colonialised individuals; the silence surrounding them is deafening. So, I then tried to do biographical work on the paths taken by these women, in their uniqueness and in their complexity, trying to have as little prejudice as possible: in other words, taking the minutest traces of their words seriously and starting from the principle that they weren’t complete victims with no possibility of defending themselves or resisting.


This system – the colonial regulation of prostitution – had been put in place by men for men: it talked endlessly about women, without women themselves ever being heard.

These are acts of micro-resistance, but, multiplied over and over again, they can undermine a system and bring it down from within. That’s what these women did: they destroyed the system through their many acts of micro-resistance.

The book Sexe, race et colonies includes a very rich iconography, with over 1200 images selected from a corpus of 70 000 documents: private photos, postcards, advertisements and so on. How do images play a major role in constructing representations of gender in the context of colonisation?

I studied the image, the perception, the imaginary, the fantasy associated with these women. The pioneering works by Edward Saïd and Michel Foucault had blind spots: Michel Foucault on the question of colonialism and “race”, and Edward Saïd on the question of feminism and women, as many feminist scholars have since demonstrated. I said to myself – we’re now in the mid-1990s – that there should be a feminist critique of Orientalism. I think that I was one of the first female historians to say that the orientalist paintings from the first half of the 20th century weren’t about the Orient. There’s a major misunderstanding: the women in them are presented as Orientals because, for example, it allows them to be undressed by giving them an exoticised femininity. However, they are white Parisian models, “painted as Algerian women”, at least in the first phase of Orientalist painting. In the same way, black women in Orientalist paintings were systematically side-lined: there are very few paintings that place them in an erotic position; they are often the servants of others, of those whom we really desire.

In short, you could say that from the outset I’ve presented a political vision of history while staying true to the ethics of my field. Like every profession, to be a historian follows ethical rules that require taking a step back from a number of things. That’s why I totally identify with the term used by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch to define herself as a “politically engaged historian”. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t do scientific work: rather, it means that there is neither absolute truth nor objective knowledge. All knowledge is situated and subjective because it is carried by situated and subjective individuals. My job is to produce critical subjectivity.

Why was the regulatory system for prostitution in North Africa under French rule put in place, and what does this reveal about power relations between colonisers and the colonised?

The French did not want to marry colonised women – because of scientific racism, notably – but nonetheless “reserved” some of them for their sexual consumption. To do so, a system had to be put in place to allow the legal monopolisation of these women. The French were the unquestionable victors, so they believed they had a “sexual right” to the colonised, but they knew that they could not have access to all women, otherwise it would have literally blown up colonial society. So, with the male elites of colonised societies, they negotiated which women would be “sacrificed” to sexual intermingling and put in place a system of coercive regulation to control the process. That’s how the regulatory system for prostitution was born. Mixed sexual relations were channelled into a space that was not deemed problematic as it concerned women who had already been “degraded” (former slaves, courtesans, prostitutes etc.) by men from both societies. Despite this, as I said earlier, many of these women were involved in subversion and/or rebellion. These rebellions weren’t revolutions, but they were rebellions all the same.


By studying prostitution, we can understand all power relations.

Prostitution and prostitutes are often presented as marginal. That’s a mistake, because prostitution is at the heart of society. By studying prostitution, we can understand all power relations. When we take the time to listen seriously to prostituted people, it stares us in the face: the centrality of commercialised sex, and at the same time this incredible space that allows us to see the violence of power relations between multiple and intersecting individuals. In colonial prostitution, all of this is maximised as prostitutes are subjected to extreme domination. We cannot pretend that it’s just about sex: it’s a matter of state. The Algerians, for example, had almost always been occupied since the Phoenicians, but from 1830, the feature of colonisation was the massive and unprecedented monopolisation of women, all the more important given the powerfully patriarchal society where the question of male honour – measured against the control of women – is central. On both sides, women were used to settle scores between men.

The book shows just how our contemporary societies, especially in the former European colonial powers, are heavily imbued with the legacy of colonisation in representations of race and gender, be it the representation of women or men. How did representations of masculinity evolve in this context?

This period saw a very marked redefinition of masculinity across Europe. From the 1860s onwards, there was a determination to domesticate men and channel their aggression, including sexual aggression, which caused lots of public order problems (brawls, honour killings, harassment and violence, rapes, etc). Political leaders at the end of the 19th century were men of order in the full sense of the term: they regulated everything, categorised everything, controlled everything, they wanted an ordered, rational, Cartesian society. Men would therefore be “trained” in a certain form of masculinity in homosocial institutions like school, sports organisations, the army and so on. This process aimed to construct what I call a sort of “masculine righteousness”, an acceptable average. In the same period, doctors, particularly sex therapists, started explaining what “good” sexuality was: the frequency of sexual relations, the nature of practices considered to be acceptable, the categorisation of “perversions”. “Good sexual relations” were clearly first and foremost heterosexual, the woman always had to be in a position of submission, their aim was essentially procreational and, to ensure procreation, their practice had to be quite – but not too – regular. All of these heteronormative prescriptions contributed towards the codification of the intimate.

Colonisation understood this: the masculinity of Other men would be constructed in opposition, as they were never part of this “civilising of mores” that was getting underway at the time in Europe. This exercise in delegitimisation did enormous damage because it called into question the masculine identity of colonialised men in highly patriarchal societies.

How did this process feed the narrative that colonised men were inferior?

There was a desire to delegitimise them, through “too much” or “too little”, through the creation of two stigmatising categories. The first was that of the sexual predator, the hyper-masculine compulsive rapist. In France, this was embodied in the enduring form of the Arab who not only had a knife between his teeth but “his penis constantly hanging out of his trousers”. From the 19th century, we find texts saying: “Rape is the Arab’s everyday pleasure.” This representation was useful on several levels then as it is today: on the one hand, it allowed sexual violence to be blamed on those men over there; on the other, it allowed “their” women to continue to be controlled.

This categorisation is recorded in the wild, obsessive ideas about genital organs with a pseudo-scientific literature quibbling over the apparently oversized penises of black men primarily, and then of Arabs, with Arabs moreover supposed to be “vicious” and “perverted”, while black people were instead represented as “big children”. The whole framework of categories of perversion that was being theorised at the time in Europe in French, German and British sexual therapy was applied to Algerian society, for example. In the Belle Epoque period, Arabs were of course presented as zoophiles, paedophiles, necrophiliacs, sodomites, etc.

The second category of delegitimisation of the masculinity of these men led them to always be considered as “sub” or “too little”: in other words, as feeble and effeminate but not necessarily homosexual, who don’t fit the masculine ideal. These ideas of “too much” or “too little” can be used separately and at the same time too: we can condemn them for being hyper feminine and, at the same time, hyper masculine. In any case, in the colonial context, they were perceived as not being like European men, as being dangerous. So, they were to be avoided, which was the goal: to prevent the women of the colonisers from having relations with them (while the colonisers did not deny themselves the use of colonised women). Which proves that sex was central, because if it wasn’t, there wouldn’t have been these sexual lines that are so strongly associated with colour lines or racial lines.

How do you connect your work with feminism?

I’ve always been militant, and most of my political engagement has been feminist. I studied history because I know that the national narrative is something powerfully ideologised, that there are facts and values that aren’t in it, and that some groups and individuals are poorly represented. Yet, in colonial processes, people and societies have been done lasting damage and for that we are today collectively responsible… we must therefore strive to repair as much as possible. This begins by accepting the fact that we have only been, individually and collectively, very imperfectly decolonised: we think that we live in a world where relations between people are equal, but we experience inequality every day. This inequality, structural and systematic, is not, of course, only linked to colonisation, but it nonetheless bears a great deal of responsibility due to the fact that it was – and in the colonial world continues to be – one of the great sources of discrimination.


I studied history because I know that the national narrative is something powerfully ideologised, that there are facts and values that aren’t in it, and that some groups and individuals are poorly represented.

It’s here that feminism can help. Because feminism is a comprehensive political theory that is not just dedicated to women’s rights. It’s a repair tool that is founded on a number of very simple things: first, self-conscientisation, and then self-liberation. This requires a difficult exercise: never projecting yourself onto people that you meet, whether dead or alive. Each must take their own path to conscientisation and liberation. This is very much an integral part of feminism. That’s why I categorically reject the notion of absolute and definitive victim.

Returning to the controversy generated by the book’s release, you say that you are not lumping together questions of domination and questions of violence.

Starting from the principle that an image – which is necessarily a construction – is necessarily reality is very problematic. Similarly, believing that what we see – and we always see what we want to see – is real can lead to the falsification, through anachronism or dogmatism, of an image’s content. Of course, I’m not saying that there aren’t victims or systems of domination – I’m saying quite the opposite – but that doesn’t change the fact that individuals also have strategies for accommodation so that they can live in societies as they are, including when they are terribly coercive. These strategies are also important for understanding their paths and their individuality; there can, for example, be acts of resistance in the face of intersecting patriarchal and/or colonial domination.

Before the release of Sexe, Race et Colonies, a major newspaper published some fairly hardcore images featured in the book, which provoked outrage in some militant decolonial and Afro-feminist circles. What did you think about this controversy?

I can understand the opinion piece by Cases Rebelles entitled “Our bodies”, but I think there’s been a misunderstanding, because these aren’t “their” bodies. What’s more, these women are not bodies at all and belong to nobody but themselves. We therefore have to search for them to understand them and not start from the principle that “we are them” and “they are us”.


My role is to train critical minds, starting with my own: stepping back from one’s own prejudices, working from one’s ambivalences.

When we search for them – and it’s often very hard to find them because the archives are most often silent – we above all bring to light their paradoxes, their ambivalences, their contradictions, their tensions… Resituating them in this human complexity is not to deny the violence of domination but, on the contrary, to give ourselves a chance to eradicate it from our world today. In the national survey on violence against women in France that Maryse Jaspard coordinated in 2000, she reminded us, quite rightly, that racialised women suffer more sexual violence and rapes than other women, both in French overseas territories and in continental France. This is precisely because everything that the book talks about is still there. This violence is alive, persistent – it’s not a relic.

I don’t believe that I hold the truth. My role is to train critical minds, starting with my own: stepping back from one’s own prejudices, working from one’s ambivalences. But I’m fully engaged in this approach because I have the strong conviction that at stake with these issues are very important things for our society in France, but also much more broadly in Europe and the world. This book, though not perfect, can be very useful because first and foremost it’s a weapon of war.

[1] Michelle Perrot, Les Femmes ou les Silences de l’Histoire, 2012.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/sex-in-colonial-empires-and-its-legacy-in-europe-today/

The Melodrama of Climate Change Denial


The far right likes to position itself as the ultimate good, a hero standing up to an evil world. Melodrama is its genre of choice, through which it tells of its fights with environmentalists, feminists, and minorities. Political scientist Cara Daggett explains how this thinking shapes right-wing politics in the US, what environmentalists can do to tackle it, and why the importance of storytelling must not be underestimated in the green transition.

Green European Journal: In the past you’ve spoken about how the main genre of climate change denialism is melodrama. Can you explain?

Cara Daggett: I have been studying the new kinds of stories that the far right is telling about climate change, and how these are shifting as people start to experience increasingly intense planetary changes. I am specifically interested in the relationship between misogyny, fossil fuel support, and climate denial on the far right. These elements are often analysed separately – for instance, the #MeToo movement on one hand, and environmental destruction on the other. Instead, I have proposed the concept of “petro-masculinity” to think about how this group of problems are related, how gender anxiety slithers alongside climate anxiety.

I use genre to help explain this relationship. I am interested in genre, or storytelling more generally, because social genres help people organise their experiences and turn them into shared meanings. Genres can produce a sense of community. They tell people what to pay attention to, what is connected to history as part of a pattern, and what to expect in the future. Especially when living through crisis moments, you can see how genre-making can be important politically.

Intersectionality also helps us understand a key tactic that has been used to defend the genre of Man: divide your opponents, ensure that they remain fragmented.

Melodrama, for a long time a powerful political genre in the US, appears to be a key genre for the American far right. I came to appreciate its role in US politics through Elisabeth Anker’s book Orgies of Feeling, where she shows the dominance of melodrama after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Melodrama is a highly dramatic and emotive form that constructs polar opposites of good and evil – like the “Axis of Evil” after 9/11.1 Melodrama idealises the morality of the audience. Unlike tragedy, it does not ask for self-reflection. The heroes are purely good, and villainy and evil are “outside” the community. It is not surprising then that melodrama is often co-opted by authoritarian movements, although you can find it in democratic publics too.

You have mentioned that this genre can reflect on a wide range of topics. Can you tell us about this intersectional component of melodrama?

Another influence for me came from Sylvia Wynter’s work on how the human is also a genre.2 For Wynter, genre is a way to theorise this kind of intersectionality where race, gender, class, and sexuality could all be seen as criteria that determine who is to be counted as fully human, and who is to be excluded. Wynter maps out these stories across Western imperial history as “genres of Man”, and they tell us what counts as human achievement, as being worthy of membership in the community. We still see these stories circulating today in the celebration of figures like the breadwinners, the investors, the entrepreneurs, or, in the categories of a popular phrase in the American right, “the makers versus the takers”. From this perspective, the resurgence of the far right today is only the latest instance of movements across Western history that have been hell-bent on defending the genre of Man, on maintaining all the exclusions that privilege white men and Western capitalism.

Intersectionality also helps us understand a key tactic that has been used to defend the genre of Man: divide your opponents, ensure that they remain fragmented. Wynter shows how those exclusions are interconnected from the start, meaning that they also need to be dismantled together if new genres are to emerge.

Today, environmental justice movements worldwide (like the Sunrise Movement in the US) are insisting on the intersection of these different kinds of violence and are putting them on the agenda together. They show how environmental violence depends on social injustice, which is why people of colour and poor communities suffer the most from climate change. We should never forget how important it is to build alliances across social justice movements, not just because it amplifies our voices, but also because these different kinds of violence are best addressed systemically.

What exactly is the meaning of climate denial in the genre you outlined?

What I see in the far right is not always denial. In a 2018 paper I called it climate refusal,3 but perhaps climate defiance would be a better term. An attachment to the righteousness of fossil fuel lifestyles seems to bring about a desire to not just deny, but to defy climate change. Defying climate change is different from ignoring or downplaying it, which is what many people do who otherwise acknowledge its reality, myself included.

Climate defiance occurs when people understand the threat but refuse to change, doubling down on the violence. This is partly a way to defend elite interests and profit, but it’s also a psychological defence mechanism, a way to manage threats to powerful identities and to channel feelings of impotence onto more vulnerable bodies.

Using fossil fuels can feel like a moment of agency, of control, in a world that feels increasingly out of control.

Ignoring climate change is dangerous but it is a passive disposition, often connected to emotions of confusion or fear. Defiance on the far right is active and angry. Defiance can no longer rest at defending the status quo but must accelerate fossil fuel use until the last moment.

And this may often require authoritarian politics.

This speaks to the more general pleasure taken in the fossil authoritarianism of America – it feels good because it bursts the constraints of liberal, Western hypocrisy. Using fossil fuels can feel like a moment of agency, of control, in a world that feels increasingly out of control.

You said that climate refusal is more of an issue than denial. Have the deniers become completely marginal?

I do not think denial is marginal. Many people in power still regularly circulate denialist narratives. Just think of Scott Pruitt, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly untenable to deny that the climate is changing.

Denial coexists with a host of other responses on the Right, many of which contradict each other. A conservative politician or fossil fuel executive might say something that acknowledges climate change, and then enact policy or make another statement that promotes business as usual. But denial is still useful at moments, especially if it brings shock value and public attention. This makes sense in a US administration that has embraced the reality TV aspects of politics.

The complexity of climate narratives on the Right, and the cognitive dissonance they require, are important to study because they challenge the usual assumptions made about climate science communication. Many researchers have faith that once people truly understand the problem and its urgency, once they are shown how denial was manufactured by fossil fuel interests, then they will support a politics of mitigation. I don’t think this faith is entirely misplaced, otherwise I would not be teaching in higher education. But this doesn’t reflect very well what we see on the far right, where it seems that recognising climate change only fuels a violent and ethno-nationalist reaction.

The only effective way to mitigate climate change is through joint international efforts, but far-right forces are mostly unwilling to cooperate with other nations. Is this one of the reasons why they decided to defend fossil consumption?

Yes, that is true. A lot of the rhetoric around climate defiance is based on the acknowledgment that climate change requires global coordination and cooperation, which the Right dismisses as “globalism”, a term loaded with anti-Semitic connotations. Indeed, climate change is a hard problem for the American right because addressing it would require a politics counter to the interests of big donors like the Koch brothers, whose money is sunk in a fossil fuel future. It also requires an investment in a global political system that is at odds with ethno-nationalism and white supremacy. So, climate change provokes anxiety about both fossil-fuelled capitalism and about the particular conception of American sovereignty that drives them. This conception of American sovereignty is based on the belief that the US can and should have complete control over cross-border flows, and even over transnational flows abroad. That fantasy is increasingly untenable in a globalised world for many reasons, not just climate change.

If neoconservatives had reflected on the gra­vity of climate change, they could have advocated imposing some form of American climate leadership on the rest of the world, the same way the Bush government aimed to export democracy in the 2000s. Is this kind of thinking absent from mainstream American conservatism?

Some ecomodernists are certainly trying to drum up support by arguing that America needs to become a global leader in green technology and innovation. But by and large the American right sees any form of environmental policy leadership as an infringement on US power, and particularly US corporate power, given that they have successfully overturned many important environmental regulations domestically.

The American right sees any form of environmental policy leadership as an infringement on US power.

I’ll add that climate change forces the US to reckon with its historical accountability. The Right understands the US as a beacon of good in the world, but taking climate change seriously requires understanding how America has contributed significantly to the problem, historically and today, while simultaneously extracting wealth from elsewhere. Therefore, this kind of globalism requires more than just a set of new policies. It has to come with taking responsibility for a history in which the US was not always on the good side, something which would mean practising humility. Because how could those who caused the problem expect to have the best ideas for solving it? This is not to say that the US has no role to play in innovation, but rather that it should recognise that historical culpability probably produces blind spots – like the national faith in capitalism – in terms of thinking creatively about building a more sustainable future.

Another challenge would be for people to give up their comfortable ways of life. Does that play a role in the genre?

Yes, absolutely. But in terms of building political alliances, we may want to differentiate between agents and their degree of responsibility in climate change. There are, on the one hand, those who are knowingly pushing denial and defiance, and are profiting monumentally – a relatively small group of people and corporations that participate in fossil fuel boosterism, many of whom we can name. Then there are many others, including me and you, who participate with our daily activities, especially in Europe and North America where per capita consumption is so much higher than in the Global South. That is responsibility too, but addressing these different kinds of complicity brings different political problems and it is important not to collapse them. Focusing too much on consumerism as a cultural practice can distract us from that narrow focus on corporate and elite power which is such an important fulcrum for change.

This often brings me to Gramsci and his thoughts on hegemonic ideologies that make people complicit in a system that is hurting them.4 Being able to consume like Americans – cheap, mass products, delivered to your door by Amazon – provides many comforts and pleasures that cushion people from an otherwise cruel and unjust system. This is why environmental movements should be careful to not talk about consumption without also talking about social and economic justice. More than that, though, they need to talk about different practices of pleasure – all the things that people stand to gain from transformed political and economic systems that are fairer and more sustainable. From life expectancy to suicide and depression rates in the US, there is plenty of evidence that many people are hurting in the current system and stand to gain a lot from system transformation.

Can you give us an example of a good, progressive counter-narrative?

In Lauren Berlant’s book Cruel Optimism, she reflects on the experience of living through moments of disruption, when our old social and political genres that make sense of life are broken, but we are nevertheless still attached to them. We do not have new genres yet to describe the emerging reality, and the old genres give us a sense of unfounded security (cruel optimism). For example, the American “good life” genre is anchored upon consumption and middle-class status symbols like home ownership, a car, a career that pays a living wage – all of which are increasingly out of reach for most Americans (while for others, they were never really possible). These old genres break many of their promises, like the narrative that if you work hard you will get a job and achieve the dream of security. Berlant highlights the need for a proliferation of new genres, but also emphasises how difficult that is to achieve. A genre has to provide people with a sense of love and connection to a place and a community.

The current youth climate movements on the rise worldwide are providing us with visions of a green transition that give me more hope than I have had since I began studying this topic. The kinds of stories that young people are telling are different from the horror and dystopia that dominated how we talked about climate change five or ten years ago.

How can progressives use Gramsci’s concept of hegemony?

Many progressives are attentive to Gramsci and the importance of addressing hegemonic ideology as part of systemic change. I’m interested in what this says about the role of art and aesthetics – something fascist movements usually excel at, and which will need to be countered. For instance, during the first New Deal in the US of the 1930s, art was understood to play an important role in communicating the new economic model to the public. The government hired artists, photographers, graphic artists, and writers to engage with the public and to depict New Deal imaginaries, just as they hired engineers or economists. I saw a similar attention to aesthetics in a video made with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to promote the Green New Deal, in which she teamed up with video and graphic designers to imagine the story of a little girl who grows up in a world in which the Green New Deal has been enacted. It was, in fact, creating an alternative genre of future American well-being. That’s just a small example, but it is important not to underestimate the significance of aesthetics and art because pleasure has to be part of the story. We need new genres that reconceptualise pleasure as something different from consumerism. These may be built upon the pleasures we have lost in today’s economic system: time, community, leisure – and not leisure activities premised upon retail.

Your latest book, The Birth of Energy (2019, Duke), traces the genealogy of energy back to the 19-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today’s uses of energy. Could you tell us more about it?

The book is a history of energy; and by that, I mean not a history of fuels but a history of the concept and the science of energy itself. It describes how energy came to be both an object of science and an object of politics. In my research, I found that the concept of energy did not emerge until the middle of the 19th century, when experiments with steam engines were already up and running.

People conceive of energy as a universal, trans-historic fact of nature, while the book shows that energy enters science only as a particular kind of situated knowledge, one that becomes possible in the interplay of humans and steam engines at the time of industrial imperialism.

Productivism has become more than a technical goal; it is also a dominant modern ethos according to which everyone and everything – not just humans but also the earth itself – should be put toward being productive.

Rethinking the history of energy is particularly important because there are many ways of defining energy – even scientifically. But we are nevertheless using one particular logic of energy: an engineer’s logic. This logic is all about the maximisation of work and the minimisation of waste. In The Birth of Energy, I show how this practical goal, which may have its uses in certain circumstances, slips very easily into a moral valuation about work and waste.

How is this notion related to our current narratives about the environment?

It can help explain the ecomodernist position which values productivism above all else. Productivism has become more than a technical goal; it is also a dominant modern ethos according to which everyone and everything – not just humans but also the earth itself – should be put toward being productive. Productivist values are rarely called into question or challenged, I think partly because they have a whiff of physics about them. The dominant logic of energy seems to certify them. Therefore, I want to unsettle the naturalness of energy, and show that this logic of energy has a history. It is not universal, and it does not prove that energy-at-work is inherently superior, either ethically or ecologically.

You can see quite clearly how productivism serves the American right in their defence of fossil fuels. Anytime there is a threat to a pipeline, or to extraction, the defence revolves almost entirely around jobs and economic growth. Given this focus on jobs, in my book I stage a conversation between the politics of energy and post-work political movements that have tried to unsettle the assumption that the sine qua non (an indispensable and essential ingredient) of life itself is work, and that your status as a citizen is connected to your status as a worker. If we can unsettle the connection between work, productivism and moral value, if we can expand our notion of citizenship and wellbeing, and if we manage to put some practical things on the agenda, such as reducing working hours and a basic living income – which both have their flaws but still point in the right direction – it will help us to multiply new genres for a green future.

1. The term “Axis of Evil” was first used by US President George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address and was repeated throughout his presidency to identify foreign governments such as those in Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as common enemies of the US, and to rally public opinion behind the War on Terror.

2. Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican writer and cultural theorist who is best known for her writings on the theories of history, literature, science, and Black studies.

3. Cara Daggett (2018). “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire.” Millennium, 47(1), pp. 25–44

4. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was an Italian Communist politician and philosopher. His concept of hegemony refers to the process through which the bourgeoisie uses its moral and intellectual ability to subordinate the working classes by making them subconsciously consent to a system of values that do not benefit them.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-melodrama-of-climate-change-denial/

POST-GROWTH
When Time Isn’t Money: The Case for Working Time Reduction

In the world as we know it, work is the boss of time; the lives of all, from the overworked to the unemployed, are dictated by work, or lack thereof. Yet though some may protest, reducing working hours will be an integral part of shifting to a fairer, healthier, and more sustainable society. Analyst and working-time expert Anna Coote explains why the time for change is ripe.

Aurélie Maréchal: You advocate, like many others, for a reduction of working time, whether through a 30-hour week, longer holidays or other working-time arrangements. Could you summarise the main reasons for this proposal?

Anna Coote: Three main categories of reasons for a shorter working week are the distribution of paid work, the redistribution of unpaid work, and more time to live sustainably. We anticipate there being less paid work in the future, partly because of automation and partly because of the need to change the way the economy works so that it is not simply driven by growth. Exponential growth is not compatible with meeting carbon reduction targets and is not good for the planet, both because of emissions and because of material surplus. It is in the interest of social justice to distribute the work that is available more evenly across the population.

The second reason is the redistribution of unpaid work, such as childcare and domestic responsibilities. At the moment, there are huge inequalities in the amount of disposable time that people have, particularly between men and women. Women have very little disposable time, often due to caring responsibilities for children or elderly relatives. It’s important to release men from the imperative to work long hours so that they can share the unpaid work with women more equally.

The third reason is because if people have more disposable time, they may be able to live more sustainably. Sometimes doing things that are sustainable takes more time: repairing things instead of throwing them away and buying new ones, and growing and preparing food rather than buying heavily processed ready meals. In addition, in many cases we buy energy-intensive things because we are busy, due to our lack of time: airline tickets, convenience foods, travelling by car instead of walking or taking the train, and a lot of domestic gadgetry.

Sustainability is a relatively uncommon argument in favour of the reduction of working time, but it might not be sufficient. In a hyper-consumerist society, isn’t there a risk that freeing up more time will just reinforce unsustainable patterns of consumption?

The reduction of working time is no silver bullet. It is one policy that is needed alongside other policies, not least the importance of improving the living wage. There is some quite interesting work – although it certainly does not give us any definitive answers – on whether freeing up more time will just reinforce unsustainable patterns of consumption, which looks at leisure activities. Hobbies can either be cruel or kind to the environment, depending on the way we go about them. There’s a kind of gradient of possibilities for the way we use our time. For example, growing vegetables can be done in a very energy-neutral way, or you can use polytunnels, artificial lighting, and so on. So, it does depend on how everything is done. Juliet Schor has done an analysis of OECD countries that looks at their average paid working hours and their carbon emissions, and there is a correlation between shorter working hours and lower carbon emissions.



More generally in terms of sustainable development, my research on reduced working time started out based on the anticipation that the economy is not going to keep on growing. A lot of work has been done by Peter Victor, Tim Jackson, and other economists on this. An economy driven by the growth imperative is unsustainable. We cannot decouple growth from carbon emissions. Therefore, if you are going to have an economy that isn’t growing, what we might call prosperity without growth, you’ve got to think about what it will do to the job market. A lot of people would say, and they’d be right, that if we don’t change, there’s going to be a lot of unemployment, a lot of unhappiness, and people would resist that kind of move.

Hervé Kempf has written on how the rich are destroying the planet – the more money and less time you have, the bigger your impact on the environment. How can we – structurally and through policy – address this link between sustainability, time, and individual purchasing power?

First, we need government policy to improve the quality and quantity of public services, including public transport. We should also look at a maximum income, as a complement to a minimum income. Minimum income is quite well established now, the idea that nobody should fall below a certain level, the poverty line, and then you’ve got the living wage line. So could we identify – through dialogue – what is the maximum that people should have? This is a political challenge, an economic challenge, and a statistical challenge.

Wealthy people usually do have a higher environmental impact when they have several homes, lots of cars, and they fly a lot. But there does come the point at which people’s income is still increasing but their damage to the planet does not continue to grow at the same pace; they can buy expensive things like paintings, which you can do with a lot of money, but it doesn’t do much damage to the environment. We need to look in detail at the idea of a ‘riches line’, with a view to curbing the consumption patterns of those on higher incomes.

Some Green parties but also trade unions are calling for a reduction of working time without loss of pay, or at least not for those with a low income. Is that realistic? What would be your policy recommendations to ensure that working-time reduction doesn’t reinforce income inequality?

You need to put any advocacy for reduced working hours with advocacy against low wages and practical steps to establish decent hourly rates of pay. For example, you need to ensure a guaranteed minimum income and to strengthen the bargaining power of trade unions so that they can make sure that hourly rates of pay are more compatible with reduced working hours. Then you have more innovative suggestions, like time-care credits, so if you are caring for a child or an elderly relative, you get a credit that can be paid towards your pension or redeemed in some other way. And then, most important of all in my view, is the social wage: the benefit of public services such as health care, education, social care, and public transport – all the things which enable us to meet our needs, which are partly or fully provided collectively through the state. The social wage has been estimated to have a massive redistributive effect because it amounts to a far higher proportion of the income of those who are poor than those who are better off. In a nutshell, reduced working hours must go hand in hand with a strong social wage, better power for trade unions, and decent hourly rates of pay.


Reduced working hours must go hand in hand with a strong social wage, better power for trade unions, and decent hourly rates of pay

Another reality across all sectors and positions in the labour market today is ‘burn out’: overworked employees who are pushed towards 60-hour weeks, unachievable deadlines, and constant online availability. Resistance to working-time reduction often comes from top executives and managers – in all kinds of sectors and organisations – who cannot imagine doing their job in fewer hours, thereby confusing leadership with control and power centralisation. How do we tackle this mindset in society and convey that it’s not only about reducing working time, it’s about sharing power?

There is a quite large and growing group of top female executives in the UK, possibly in other countries too, who are campaigning for things like job sharing and reduced hours because they have often brought up children as well and it’s been a struggle. Some of these senior female executives might be a good resource. A lot of senior male executives never see their children and are effectively cut off from their own family lives. Women are probably the key to the change.

Also worth considering are the chairmen and women who sit on the boards of big companies and work two or three days a week. We overlook how they almost prefigure the way we would like senior executives to work. They do important work, they work very little, yet they are paid very handsomely and are often extremely influential. So these are at least two routes for achieving that cultural change.

One of the most recent European experiences of working-time reduction has been the French 35-hour week introduced in 1998. This has often been criticised, but detailed studies point to positive impacts as well. What lessons can be learnt from the French experience and what are the key aspects of this case that should serve as guidelines for initiatives in other European countries, including in terms of implementation and political bargaining?

The first of the two laws that introduced a shorter working week in France, the Aubry Laws, was mainly popular with the workforce, particularly with parents of young children. And many people were satisfied with it. Then there was a second law in response to a big lobby from employers who didn’t want the 35-hour week. The second law shifted the balance of power from the workers to the employers by giving the employers more control over when the workers use their time. All in all, France still has much lower working hours on average than the UK does, for example. So it was a good innovation and we learned a lot from it about the importance of flexibility and arranging working hours to suit the needs of workers.


The reduction of working hours could unlock the intractable problem of gender inequality

We have also learned about the dangers of governments introducing change too suddenly, making it too vulnerable to political opposition. If you have a much more gradual transition, say over 10 years, to shorter working hours, then you can change the climate of opinion as you go and build political support.

You mentioned the distribution of unpaid work as one of the reasons behind your support for the reduction of working time. Would a reduction of working time help some of the long-lasting feminist struggles, such as reducing the gender pay gap or achieving a more equal division of labour? What might the potential challenges or counter-productive effects be?

The reduction of working hours could unlock the intractable problem of gender inequality. I would not like to suggest that this is the single solution, but I do think it would help to tackle the root of the problem. But this would only work if men as well as women take reduced hours and share more of the burden at home. The worst thing that could happen is that we get shorter working hours and it’s mainly women who take them up, because that would just entrench this pattern of women doing the unpaid labour and men doing the paid labour. So there needs to be a lot more sharing of unpaid labour as well as reduction in paid working time for men and women. When you envisage a man and a woman living together with one or two children and they are both working 40 hours a week, for example, and they take a cut to 30 hours a week, you’ve got 20 additional hours that can be used for childcare. I am not in favour of exclusively domestically-based childcare, but I do think it could help to make childcare more affordable in countries like the UK where it’s very expensive.

Whenever we talk about the reduction of working time, and this goes back now about seven or eight years, it is hugely popular with the media. When I go for an interview or I talk to somebody, it’s nearly always women who are so keen on the idea because they are trying to juggle parenting and their career and so on, so there is a lot enthusiasm for it.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/when-time-isnt-money-the-case-for-working-time-reduction/

PRE CORONAVIRUS

The Creeping Advance of Working from Home

3 October 2019

While debate rages around the changing world of work in the era of robots and artificial intelligence, profound shifts in working practices and the way work is organised rarely make the headlines. Yet working from home has seen unprecedented growth in our societies and extends far beyond the legal framework of remote working. A team of French sociologists[1] offer their reflections – with extracts from their field surveys – on how our relationship to work, time, and the home has changed in the past 50 years.[2]

It is 07:50 when Pathana gets up. In the time it takes to make a coffee, still in his pyjamas, he is already at work, exactly three steps from his bed – he is logged on. This daily routine is one shared by thousands of people across France.

The increasing automation of society has made situations like these possible – and, for the most part, people opt for them voluntarily. Long based on the clock-time model, societies are now reorganising themselves around the demands of immediacy and fragmented time. Something of which the sound of notifications on our computers and smartphones constantly remind us.

Over the past five years, our team of sociologists has studied the processes underlying the expansion of working from home, from sending the odd work email to working from home permanently. The aim is to understand the consequences of shifting forms of work on our private and social lives and on how we organise our homes.

Mixed temporal logics

Three interconnected temporal logics of time are crucial to lifestyles and how people use their homes. The sacred, the synchronous, and the asynchronous: these logics are tied up with symbols that represent the ways we create society.

The first of these, the sacred, borrows from religious and secular dogmas. It guides and sets the pattern for life’s big moments such as baptism, marriage and burial, as well as for periods like the seasons (through religious festivals and military celebrations) and the week (through masses or days off). The sacred helps to set common norms and put in place prohibitions. When people say that “Sunday is sacred”, they mean that Sunday is a time governed by norms that exclude other temporal logics, like that of work.

The synchronous temporal logic occupies times not governed by the sacred and sets their pattern. It helps to legitimise the demands of particular ways of organising work and is normally organised around the times defined by the sacred. It can take different forms, including conventions about starting work, finishing work, and break times.

The organising logic of industrial time considers the home as a symbolic space, with its specific time for rest and privacy to be enjoyed.

The asynchronous is a temporal logic that disrupts patterns, connections, and the hierarchy between the sacred and the synchronous. It denotes, for example, work that encroaches into “sacred family time”. It is urgency and immediacy which require that one activity be interrupted to focus on another. The asynchronous imposes its own logic and involves a whole series of adaptations and reorganisations of activities and time, breaking and reconfiguring “normal” working patterns.

On the one hand, the organising logic of industrial time, considered“sacred and synchronous”, orders social connections around shared markers of time: clocks and watches. These order and pace the rhythm of the individual and social patterns that serve as a reference for organising time – material, spiritual, and cultural – in different urban spaces. Apart from in a few professions, the organising logic of industrial time considers the home as a symbolic space, with its specific time for rest and privacy to be enjoyed.

In the organising logic of post-industrial time, the sacred loses even more of its aura and asynchronous organisational time gains legitimacy but loses value. Productive logics introduce a sophistication to representations of time in which multiple ways of accessing work (part time, flexitime, night work) are combined with lifestyles and home lives that are becoming partially individualised. Asynchronous life, which in the past was more the result of work in the public interest than the requirements of a productive logic (hospitals, emergency services, show business), is becoming normal and losing its social value. A clock and direct communication are no longer enough for planning meetings. The advent of messages, inboxes, and voicemail leads to different response times and allow the coordinated arrangement of travel and meeting time. The right of the home to be a symbolic (and hence private) space is increasingly called into question by the partial intrusion of these ways of working.

Finally, a cybernetic logic of time implies the temporal existence of a productive world that must be managed 24 hours a day. It marks a clear break with old representations of time, old ways of organising production, and old means of measurement. Whereas the hour was once used to measured working time, that is now less and less the case. Contrary to other ways of organising time, the cybernetic logic creates the illusion that collective time is controlled by individuals and that they are in charge of complex and incessant production processes as well as management of their wellbeing. Smart watches and home automation systems are emblematic of this shift. The home and home life are now destined to internalise the demand for shared time and space that is open to the world and, more specifically, to working from home. 

Homeworking: a result of profound shifts

This general framework for understanding temporal logics enables a critical reading of changes in how working time is organised. New information and communication technologies enable the coordination and adjustment, in time and space, of internal and external human resources to meet the needs of production and service on demand. Over the past 20 years, these technologies have led to a mixture of production times and places, allowing production to move beyond the walls of the company towards urban spaces (co-working) and the home (working from home) in a multi-site working model.

Working from home has helped work creep into every time and space in the home, shaping the choices of occupants by making them question their priorities.

One definition of working from home might be bringing work into the home, either into a permanent space (a dedicated office) or a temporary one (the living room, kitchen, bedroom, toilet). It can include employment that is fully or partially conducted in the home and can be managed either within a legal and contractual framework or in a less formal manner.

The spread of this new form of work calls into question the representation of the home as a place of reassurance, protected and protective because removed from work.[3] At time when the expression “maintaining a good work-life balance” has become a management-speak leitmotif in the healthy management of human resources, working from home has helped work creep into every time and space in the home, shaping the choices of occupants by making them question their priorities. Our research, both qualitatively and quantitatively, confirms this hypothesis and reveals that homeworking concerns a wide range of different work profiles and statuses.

A permanent redefining of identity

When work takes root at home, turning the home into a production unit, a number of paradoxes emerge. The most frequently reported by our interviewees is that they no longer know who they are or in which spacetime they are in.

Laurène is a freelance designer and is married with two children. Working from home, she produces online tutorials for making DIY furniture for streaming platforms. Her subscribers can constantly ask her for advice. One of the criteria used by the platform to rate the quality of her work is her responsiveness. Responding faster allows her to improve the visibility of her channel. This means that when she is with her nearest and dearest, she can at any moment be called away by her work. Sitting on the terrace with a glass of wine, enjoying the company of friends, she is never totally present, her attention immediately focused on her phone as soon as there is a work notification (for which she has dedicated ringtones).

As the process of working from home becomes more entrenched, the idea of reference points, distances, and identity boundaries becomes ever more blurred. It is often suggested that the solution is a room dedicated to work in the home. However, few of those interviewed seem to believe it is effective. Most report that time in their social life is impinged upon by work commitments that they incorporate as if they were their own personal “biological” patterns. Home life, then, can become a “black hole” in terms of identity, despite attempts to keep work within a dedicated space.

Various alternative framings are put forward in an attempt to gloss over this. Homeworkers can “walk around the house in socks” or “stay in [their] pyjamas” all day long, provided they never forget the commitments, temporal in particular, that come with the job. Even if the new requirements of work are only overturning now outdated representations of wellbeing, they nevertheless demand far greater investment in one’s work.

Is co-working the solution?

In this process of “work-home” confinement, leaving the house from time to time can act as a sort of safety valve. In France today, private co-working spaces are estimated to host over 100 000 co-workers. And that excludes the explosion in other non-profit locations or places in the social and solidarity economy that offer co-working spaces. Often described as the new workspaces for the post-financial crisis labour force, co-working models are presented as particularly suited to a generation that has never experienced the office cubicle.

Co-working spaces are aimed at the growing number of workers generically classified as freelance. For potentially precarious communities, these spaces are generally seen to promise a strong network for support so they can keep going and share tools dedicated to this alternative form of work. Upon joining a co-working space, a relationship is built with others based on their profession and their work-hard (and play-hard) attitude, but not on the specifics of their task or the objectives they pursue. Of course you expect to form close bonds with your new co-workers, when a space’s key selling point is being a home away from home with a comfy sofa, free tea and coffee, and nap room.

Happy alienation

Most of the people interviewed as part of our research unanimously expressed a real feeling of wellbeing from working from home. But they also had the sense that the urgency of work governed all of their social situations. It is as if several social roles overlap without clearly defined boundaries between them. This sense points to happiness in alienation, or happy alienation. Alienation is understood here to be the dispossession of the individual in the sense of a loss of control to another (be it an individual, virtual collective, network or company). It can reflect an inauthenticity in the existence experienced by the alienated individual.

Today, we are already seeing houses shared by groups of homeworkers and housing associations considering the creation of co-working spaces in their buildings.

Can we then hypothesise that project-based working, which entails a 24/7 mobilisation of the workforce, will undermine representations of sacred spaces as well as shared time and patterns by forcing others to live with and agree to it?

Today, we are already seeing houses shared by groups of homeworkers and housing associations considering the creation of co-working spaces in their buildings. If this logic becomes established in the productive and reproductive order, it will circumvent all current representations of privacy in the home and home life. Then, with the boundaries between the demands of work and the privacy of home blurred, this new form of employment will need only to build the legal framework for its legitimacy before work enjoys primacy over every other social relationship.

[1] Tanguy Dufournet, Patrick Rozenblatt and Djaouidah Séhili, Université Lyon 2, Centre Max Weber.

[2] Djaouidah Séhili, Pour une sociologie intersectionnelle du travail, postdoctoral lecturing qualification, Lyon 2017; Patrick Rozenblatt, Razzia sur le travail, Critique de l’invalorisation du travail, Editions Syllepse, 2017.

[3] Monique Eleb, Les 101 mots de l’habitat à l’usage de tous, Collection 101 mots, Éditions Archibooks, Paris, 2015.

5 ways to demand justice during the COVID19 pandemic

Atiya Jaffar -350.org 

Friends,

We are in a moment like no other in modern history. In every corner of the world, COVID-19 is upending our lives and livelihoods, and putting the most vulnerable in our communities at even greater risk. That is why, amidst this dark and difficult time, it’s been so inspiring to see the ways that people are coming together in this moment.

After seeing so much mutual aid organizing, community care, and solidarity day in and day out, I can’t help but feel that, despite the challenge, we will pull through this together.

And, as we do, we need our governments to be with us in having each others’ backs. That’s why, along with tens of thousands of people, organizations, and groups, we’ve signed onto support 5 key principles for a just COVID-19 response and recovery. Will you add your name and demand a just recovery from this pandemic?

We know that we can’t get out of one crisis by making others worse. Even before this pandemic hit, people were already struggling in the midst of a climate crisis. That’s why these principles lay out a roadmap for responding to COVID-19 the way so many of us are, with care, compassion, and vision. 

Here they are:

Put people’s health first, no exceptions.

Provide economic relief directly to the people.

Help our workers and communities, not corporate executives.Create resilience for future crises.

Build solidarity and community across borders – do not empower authoritarians.

Click here to add your name in support of the 5 principles for a just recovery.

But, while we need to come together around these principles, we also can’t wait to act. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of actions you can take right now to support people in your community and demand government action for the most vulnerable in our communities:

Demand a moratorium on rent, mortgage, and bills before April 1st.

Call Cabinet Ministers to demand employment supports for all migrants.

Speak out against man camps putting Indigenous communities at a heightened risk.

Call on the government to invest in people not Big Oil.

Practice community care by joining a response network near you.

We’ve put together a blog with more information on these 5 actions along with additional resources. Check it out here.

Make no mistake, these are hard times. But, together, we can make it through.

With hope,
Atiya

350.org is building a global climate movement. You can connect with us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and become a sustaining donor to keep this movement strong and growing.

A message to Canadians regarding COVID-19

Ed Broadbent, Broadbent Institute


Mar 28, 2020



Hello everyone,

Like many of you, I’m at home in self-isolation. My house is comfortable and my garden is coming to life through my window so it’s not so bad. All things considered, I’m pretty fortunate. But many others are having a very difficult time.

The COVID-19 crisis is already having a devastating impact on the health of many of our fellow citizens, and the family finances of millions of Canadians have taken a body blow.

There’s no doubt this is a tough time. One of the toughest that I can remember in my 84 years.

But we as Canadians have the values, the drive, and the public institutions to cope and to recover. It starts with our shared belief that we have a duty to take care of each other.

This “duty to each other” is the bedrock of the social democratic values I have stood for all of my life. The values that gave birth to Medicare, Employment Insurance, public education – in fact all the public programmes that are working for us and that are so critical right now.

Often, in our history, it’s been moments of collective difficulty like the Great Depression that gave birth to new thinking, new approaches, and a renewed focus on taking care of each other.

This crisis shows us that a strong and effective social safety net is the right choice now and in the future. Some holes in that net are quickly coming to light that we need to close in the weeks and months ahead. For instance, if our Medicare system already included universal Pharmacare many people would be having an easier time right now.

I want to thank those who give us the things we need every day, especially healthcare workers.

And also those others on the front line – like cashiers and public transit workers – who are servicing the critical spaces we still share.

Over the course of this crisis and beyond, you can count on the Broadbent Institute to fight like never before for fair treatment for all Canadians. We are determined that Canadians most in need get the help they deserve and that those with power are held to account.

I hope you and your families are well. We’re all in this together. And together we’re going to prevail. My very best wishes to you at this time.

Ed
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Ed Broadbent
Chair
Broadbent Institute