Kate Boyer

Of care and commodities: breast milk and the new politics of mobile biosubstances

Advances in lactation technology in recent years have changed the ontological status of breast milk, giving it new-found mobility. This paper considers the contested meanings over breast milk’s ‘proper place’ in US and UK society. By synthesizing scholarship from geography, gender studies and science and technology studies, I use the case of mobile breast milk to propose a new framework for how geographers might conceptualize mobile biosubstances. Drawing on the work of Waldby and Mitchell (2006), I suggest that the ways in which breast milk now travels reflect how mobile biosubstances increasingly function as a hybrid form, drawing together elements of both gift-exchanges and commodity-exchanges.

Expressing anxiety? Breast pump usage in American wage workplaces

This article considers the potential and problems for women seeking to combine breastfeeding with wage labor outside the home through the use of breast pumps. After locating the breast pump within cultural, historical and legislative contexts of shifting views about infant nutrition on the one hand and trends in womens participation in the wage work force on the other, we unpack how this technology has re-shaped the landscape of choices about infant feeding in the United States. Using disciplinary lenses of science and technology studies, feminist geography and womens studies, we examine how the breast pump has reshaped workplace experiences after childbirth. Based on interviews and survey data with respondents in Albany, New York across a range of class and racial backgrounds, we submit that while the breast pump does allow some women to combine breastfeeding and wage work outside the home, the advantages of breast pumps are constrained both by cultural attitudes about pumping as an activity, the lack of a sufficient legislative framework, as well as by the way workplaces themselves are designed.

The nursery workspace, emotional labour, and contested understandings of commoditised childcare in the contemporary UK

Day nurseries are now the most prevalent form of childcare in the UK after grandparents. Yet, in contrast to the considerable administrative attention these spaces attract in terms of certification and oversight, little is known about nurseries as places to work. We extend existing scholarship through an analysis of care practices and emotional labour in day nurseries based on 400 h of participant observation and interviews with twenty-two care workers at five facilities in the South of England. We argue that although hard, draining work, nursery workers can also experience profound emotional connections with the children in their care. We then extend our analysis to argue that various kinds of boundary-work are undertaken in nursery space to both validate strong feelings (including love) between care workers and children, and maintain conceptual coherence over the emotional entitlements of parents and care workers in the context of emotional bonds between carers and children which blur sharp divisions between ‘kin’ and ‘non-kin’. Finally, we mobilise these findings to challenge dominant theoretical conceptualisations of commoditised care as incapable of providing nourishing emotional bonds, as well as portrayals of day nurseries as a priori ‘non-nurturing’ spaces which circulate widely in the UK popular press.

“Miss Remington” Goes to Work: Gender, Space, and Technology at the Dawn of the Information Age∗

Abstract At the end of the 19th century, the financial services sector underwent a technological “revolution” with the invention of the typewriter, dictaphone, and hollerith machine. At the same time, the gender of labor within this sector was also changing, such that by the end of the first quarter of the 20th century, most of the work taking place in white-collar offices was performed by women. After introducing the broader research project on which this is based, I consider how technology and social relations shaped one another at the level of the body, the workplace, and with broader networks of branch banking, focusing on early 20th-century Montreal, Canada. I argue that the financial services sector worked to create a system in which men flowed through and women functioned as fixed points. I further argue that this pattern was echoed at different scales within the financial services industry, from the level of the body and the workplace up through spatially dispersed national-level networks.

Cultural Activism and the Politics of Place-Making

In this paper, we explore the relationship between creative practice, activism and urban place-making by considering the role they play in the construction of meaning in urban spaces. Through an analysis of two activist groups based in Stokes Croft, Bristol (UK), we argue that cultural activism provides new political prospects within the wider context of global capitalism through the cultivation of a shared aesthetics of protest. By cultivating aspects of shared history and a mutual enthusiasm for creative practice as a form of resistance, Stokes Croft has emerged as a ‘space of nurturance’ for creative sensibilities. However, we note how Stokes Croft as an autonomous space remains open-ended and multiple for activists interested in promoting different visions of social justice.

Gender, work and technology in the information workplace: from typewriters to ATMs

We consider the relations between gender and technology in the workplace, focusing on clerical work in the information workplace, especially the finance and insurance sector. Our goal is to excavate a ‘hidden history’ of how clerical work and the artifacts which sustain it have been understood and deployed under different cultural and economic circumstances. We employ an analysis of technosocial relations developed in Science and Technology Studies in which meanings about ‘technology’ and ‘society’ are mutually constitutive, changeable, and in need of maintenance in order to sustain their conceptual coherence. By drawing on examples from the USA and Canada, we argue that at various points over the twentieth century particular office technologies became ‘feminized’, or associated with characteristics coded as feminine, as a means of shaping spatial practice and social relations in the workplace.

‘Neoliberal motherhood’: Workplace lactation and changing conceptions of working motherhood in the contemporary US

Through an analysis of policy texts, population statistics, and the popular press, this article advances knowledge about working motherhood in the contemporary US and proposes a refinement to how wage-work/care-work relations are conceptualised. I focus on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2011 which grants certain rights and protections to women seeking to combine lactation with wage-work. I argue that this policy represents a form of work–life integration that is particularly burdensome for working mothers, and that expectations relating to working motherhood in the contemporary US are being reshaped around the demands of neoliberalism, producing what I term ‘neoliberal motherhood’. I assert that this policy represents a way of combining wage-work and care-work that is not captured within existing conceptualisations, and suggest that a re-working of theory in this area is needed to address cases in which embodied care-work is enfolded within the time and space of wage-work.

For home and country? Engendering nationalism in the workplace

Though geographers have taken seriously the ways in which representations of place, race, sexuality and gender are woven into narratives of nationalism through experiences of conflict, spaces of memorialization and the practice of ‘heritage’, less attention has been paid to the ways nationalism is constituted in and through day-to-day space and spatial practice in times of peace. This paper examines how nationalism is produced in and through the workplace. In particular, I focus on how narratives of nationalism were constituted within the early twentieth-century Canadian financial services sector. Through an analysis of archival materials from six Canadian financial institutions, I compare how narratives of nationalism were employed strategically by women and men in efforts to win employment in this sector after the First World War. I argue that the workplace constitutes and important site for the production and deployment of nationalist feeling, and suggest that nationalism has long been used strategically to reach multiple, sometimes competing, goals.