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Diagnosing the Contemporary – Seminar Series 2009/10

Event Date 28 April 2010

Diane Perrons (LSE) – Gender and Social Justice after the Crisis

The economic crisis of 2007-? was sparked primarily by mis-management of capital markets through speculation and excessive risk taking by very highly paid men (predominantly) in the financial centres of the western world, but the underlying causes are deeply rooted in the neo-liberal model of global development itself. Neo-liberalism is associated with unsustainable increases in earnings inequalities and a related imbalance between productivity and wages resulting in a fall in the share of output accruing to labour. These inequalities formed a key element in generating the crisis. The paper explores the processes leading to and explanations for rising earnings inequality and enduring gender inequality theoretically, and with reference to selected illustrations. As the processes generating current inequalities are so profound and embedded, it is necessary to move beyond marginal adjustments to the current neo-liberal orthodoxy and specify alterative models of development in order to secure economic and social sustainability as well as socially just societies.

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12 August 2009

Ravinder Kaur, University of Copenhagen
Bodies of Partition: Gendered Subjects, ‘Social’ Work and the Limits of Moral Citizenship

This paper is about dislocation – of female bodies dislocated from the realm of the ‘domestic’ to the realm of the public. In India’s contemporary history, the moment of Partition is also the moment when ‘women’ appear in a ruptured social space, outside the protective framework of the family, as objects of sexual violations that could be mutilated, abducted, bought, sold, exchanged, sacrificed and ultimately ‘recovered’ by the state. The dislocated female body, then, in some ways appears as a double sign of moral danger – to her ‘self’ as well as the family, community and the nation – that could only be averted and pre-empted through proper state interventions of recovery. The contentious space of ‘recovery’ is where moral hierarchies of citizenship were created among women who were ‘being recovered’ and who were ‘recovering’ them on behalf of the state. The ‘social worker’, as the women involved in recovery process were officially called, often inhabited an ambivalent position shaped by her identity as a ‘woman’ and a nationalist ‘state agent’. This paper enters this ambivalent space to consider the ways in which the notions of sacrifice, virtue, sexual purity and moral danger shaped belonging and hierarchies, as well as limitations, of moral citizenship in everyday life.

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