Abstract
This chapter focusses on ‘women’s work’: blue collar, white collar, literal and figurative. For blue-collar women, habitability is about maintaining a link between work and care, even if there is little to care about in the actual production at the company. Where the enterprise has abandoned its role as caregiver to its workers and the town, workspaces become a place of care for co-workers, self-esteem, and a source of complex affective attachment and identity production. Fraught processes of ‘remaking’ working-class women into white-collar selves are explored. Successful femininity in these cases revolves around an impossible ultra-flexibility in role playing. Women occupy the sharp end of neoliberal production-scapes as accountants and HR workers, yet are ‘trapped’ by strongly normative ethical obligations of care for others.
In the writing of this chapter I am highly indebted to Charlie Walker for the opportunity to discuss his work.
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Notes
- 1.
The lower dollar value indicates the falling value of the rouble over time.
- 2.
We met these two informants in Chap. 1.
- 3.
The significance of the ‘masculine’ linguistic gender of her factory roles as ‘master’ and ‘chief’ (nachalnik) is not lost on Galina.
- 4.
Utrata’s mothers are mainly white-collar or upwardly mobile in the sense of Katya, Polina and Julia in this chapter. They also live in the Region capital.
- 5.
While the term tusovka originally had a narrower meaning referring to more exclusive subcultural youth groups, it now has a less specific meaning relating to any ‘informal gathering of like-minded people’ (Rayport 1995: 59).
- 6.
The Russian word ‘samostoiatelnyi’, while translated as ‘independent’, is derived from the root meaning ‘to stand oneself’ and thus contains within it the sense of being ‘self-sufficient’ and self-supporting.
- 7.
Because of the shame experienced by both mother and Polina at the financial ‘failure’ of the daughter’s Moscow life, they used me as an outsider to bring the money and food on the bus to Moscow for a time. Their relief at being able to hide this activity from others was clear.
- 8.
Compare Kesküla’s account of the increasing separation of sociality and kin relations from work in an Estonian mine (2014).
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Morris, J. (2016). A Woman’s Kingdom? Affect, Care and Regendering Labour. In: Everyday Post-Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95089-8_4
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