Gender and Sociology – serie

The outsourcing of domestic work in the UK has been steadily rising since the 1970s, but there has been little research into White British women who work as independent providers of cleaning services. Work, Labour and Cleaning is a cross-cultural analysis based on new research into two particular social contexts, one in the UK and one in India. It argues that outsourced domestic cleaning can be undertaken either as work (using mental and manual skills) or as labour (usually defined as unskilled, 'natural' women’s work) depending on the social context and working conditions in which it occurs. The book challenges feminist dogma and popular myths about housework.

The feeding of human milk to socially and biologically unrelated infants is not a new phenomenon, but the Euroamerican values of individualism have generated expectations that mothers are individually responsible for feeding their own infants.Using a bio-communities of practice framework, this dynamic new analysis explores the emotional and material dimensions of the growing milk sharing practice in the Global North and its implications for contemporary understandings of infant feeding in the US.Ranging widely across themes of motherhood, gender and sociology, this is a compelling empirical account of infant feeding that stimulates new thinking about a contentious practice.

Using interviews with women from diverse backgrounds, Dabrowski makes an invaluable contribution to the debates around the gendered politics of austerity in the UK. Exploring the symbiotic relationship between the state’s legitimization of austerity and women’s everyday experiences, she reveals how unjust policies are produced, how alternatives are silenced and highlights the different ways in which women are used or blamed.By understanding austerity as more than simply an economic project, this book fills important gaps in existing knowledge on state, gender and class relations in the context of UK austerity.Austerity, Women and the Role of the State is shortlisted for the 2021 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

This book explores Chinese young men’s views of manhood and develops a new concept of ‘elastic masculinity’ which can be stretched and forged differently in response to personal relationships and local realities.Drawing from empirical research, the author uses the term shenti (body-self) as a central concept to investigate the Chinese male body and explores intimacy and kinship within masculinity. She showcases how Chinese masculinities reflect the resilience of Confucian notions as well as transnational ideas of modern manhood.This is a unique dialogue with ‘western’ discourse on masculinity, and an invaluable resource for understanding the profound social changes that transformed gendered arrangements in urban China.

Being ‘REF-able’. The impact agenda. The student experience. University audit culture has infiltrated academic life, but how should we respond? Drawing on a five-year Institutional Ethnography of UK universities, the author provides a feminist take on the neoliberal university and abolitionist reflections on audit culture. For feminist and other critical academics, the interpretative power involved in audit processes provides an opportunity to collectively challenge and subvert, re-read and re-write institutions. This book challenges the myths and misinterpretations around how academic audit processes work, arguing that if we are complicit then we have agency to do them differently.

Recent North Korean diaspora has given rise to female refugee groups fighting for the protection of women’s rights. Presenting in-depth accounts of North Korean women defectors living in the UK, this book examines how their harrowing experiences have become an impetus for their activism. The author also reveals how their utopian dream of a better future for fellow North Korean women is vital in their activism. Unique in its focus on the intersections between gender, politics, activism and mobility, Lim's illuminating work will inform debates on activism and human rights internationally.

This is a nuanced and compelling analysis of grassroots feminist activism in Russia in the politically turbulent 2010s.Drawing on rich ethnographic data, the author illustrates how a new generation of activists chose feminism as their main political beacon, and how they negotiated the challenges of authoritarian and conservative trends. As we witness a backlash against feminism on a global scale with the rise of neoconservative governments, this highly relevant book decentres Western theory and concepts of feminism and social movements, offering significant insights into how resistance can mobilize and invent creative tactics to cope with an increasingly repressed space for independent political action.

Embodying Irish Abortion Reform has been shortlisted for the 2025 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.Offering a unique perspective, this book explores the lived, embodied and affective experiences of reproductive rights activists living under, and mobilizing against, Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban. Through qualitative research and in-depth interviews with activists, the author exposes the subtle influence of the 8th Amendment on Irish women and their (reproductive) bodies, whether or not they have ever attempted to access a clandestine abortion. It explains how the everyday embodied practices, bodily labours and affective experiences of women and gestating people were shaped by the 8th amendment and through the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies. In addition, it reveals the integral role of women’s bodies and emotions in changing the political and social landscape in Ireland, through the historical transformation of the country’s abortion laws.

Embodying Irish Abortion Reform has been shortlisted for the 2025 BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.Offering a unique perspective, this book explores the lived, embodied and affective experiences of reproductive rights activists living under, and mobilizing against, Ireland’s constitutional abortion ban. Through qualitative research and in-depth interviews with activists, the author exposes the subtle influence of the 8th Amendment on Irish women and their (reproductive) bodies, whether or not they have ever attempted to access a clandestine abortion. It explains how the everyday embodied practices, bodily labours and affective experiences of women and gestating people were shaped by the 8th amendment and through the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies. In addition, it reveals the integral role of women’s bodies and emotions in changing the political and social landscape in Ireland, through the historical transformation of the country’s abortion laws.