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‘Working women’: Gender, work, and the politics of refusal

Popular discussions about the four-day working week, quiet quitting, and the great resignation following the Covid19 pandemic indicate dissatisfaction with and changing attitudes towards contemporary waged work. And yet, waged work remains central to the construction of the aspirational, entrepreneurial, hyper-industrious woman essential for development in the Global South. In this lecture, I will draw upon longitudinal ethnographic research with young women in Delhi, India to explore situated vocabularies of work as a window into changing understandings of work amidst a push towards increasing women’s workforce participation. The distinction between different forms of work shows change in and reproduction of gender, class, and caste relations, and is important for refusal of certain kinds of work. To chart a path towards understanding everyday lives that are constituted through but also entail rejection of work, I will put feminist scholarship that explores globalisation and gendered subjectivities into conversation with feminist engagements with antiwork politics.   

13 MAY 2025
16:00 – 18:00
John Henderson Lecture Room, Castlecliffe

14 MAY 2015
Masterclass
11:00-13:00
School V,
St Salvator’s Quad.

• Islam A. (2025) A woman’s job. In: A Woman’s Job: Making Middle Lives in New India. South Asia in the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press, pp.1-29.
• Islam, A. (2022). Ethnographic (dis) locations: An approach for studying marginalisation in the context of socio-economic change. Ethnography, 25(1), 38-57.

Dr. Asiya Islam

She is an Assistant Professor in Gender, Development and Globalisation at the Department of Gender Studies at the LSE. She completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge, MSc in Gender, Media and Culture at the London School of Economics, and BA(Hons) Communicative English at Aligarh Muslim University.  She is interested in the relationship between gender and work, in other words, in understanding how gender and work mutually shape each other. She interrogates the definition, classification, and value of work. Her research includes under and un-paid forms of work, such as domestic work, care work, as well as the work of preparing for work. She adopts an intersectional approach to gender and have particularly been attentive to the intersections between gender, class, and caste in her research.