The Gender and Sexualities Research Centre

City, University of London

Professor Jo Littler

Director, GSRC / Professor, Department of Sociology

I’m interested in the intersections between gender, society and culture. But I’m finding it hard to do much research at all in these lockdown conditions between the demands of teaching and homeschooling! One thing I have managed to do is finish off a short book I’ve been co-writing with Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Catherine Rottenberg and Lynne Segal called The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (out with Verso in September). Drawing on a long history of feminist scholarship, the manifesto argues that care must be valued and shared, not tolerated as an exploited form of labour shouldered mainly by women, BAME people and the poor. We need to acknowledge our mutual interdependence, the book argues, and so it asks: what would it mean to put care at the centre of every scale of life? We suggest an expanded sense of kinship, teaching boys caring skills and emotional literacy, the ‘de-gendering’ and de-racing’ of care, communities strengthened by co-operative and renewed public ownership, reinvigorated welfare states, alternatives to capitalist markets and ‘caring across borders’. So it’s a broad thought experiment on prioritising care on all levels, from the micro to the macro. I’m also working on an ongoing series of interviews with feminist theorists.

sbrp126 • July 8, 2020


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