Invisible bodies organizing against precarity: Alternative spaces of/for social reproduction

Nathalie Clavijo (Toulouse Business School)
Emmanouela Mandalaki (Neoma Business School)
Ludivine Perray (EMLyon)
Maria Daskalaki (Oxford Brookes Business School)

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Abstract

This article draws upon a 13-year auto/ethnography with a community of 10 Senegalese immigrant women in France, to explore how intersectional markers of difference are performed in the context of precarious productive and reproductive work. Drawing on hook’s theorization of home as a space of resistance against normative orders imposed on intersectional, marginalized populations and Federici’s contributions on vulnerable bodies and social reproduction, we study how gendered, racialized and marginalized bodies rely on what we refer to as invisible organizing arrangements to reclaim agency. We analyze three illustrative auto/ethnographic vignettes, part of a rich body of longitudinal diary notes and ethnographic observations, to develop a critique against the normalization of precarity experienced by immigrant women. We propose that embodied relationality and affectivity, performed in often devalued invisible spaces, namely the home and the kitchen, become essential in forming alternative arrangements of social reproduction and the collective organizing against precarity. This study enriches understandings on the organization of livelihoods against and beyond capitalism seeking to visibilize invisible embodied experiences of precarious labour.

Emmanouela Mandalaki bio (from NEOMA Business School) 

Emmanouela Mandalaki is Associate Professor of Organizations at NEOMA Business School and coordinator of the research group Inclusion, Diversity, Equality. In her research, Emmanouela engages with (auto)ethnographic and qualitative methodologies heavily informed by personal experiences involving her artistic practices and her ethnographic engagements within vulnerable contexts. She combines these with feminist thinking and creative forms of writing to explore alternative ways of engaging with questions of embodiment, ethics, gender, diversity, inclusion, social inequalities and affect in organizations. Emmanouela serves as Editor for the Feminist Frontiers section of Gender, Work and Organization and member of the Editorial Review Board for the journals Organization Studies and Organization. Her work appears in international book volumes and international academic outlets.