Conference Agenda

It is well-established that women and girls, the world over, do more unpaid care and domestic work as compared to men; and therefore are restricted in the achievement of their political, social and economic engagement. Shocks such as COVID 19, and the recent financial crisis have also brought forth the critical importance of care to the sustenance of human life, providing new opportunities and avenues for feminist activism on this issue. Feminists have put forth several solutions to this issue, mostly positioning the state as the locus of their efforts for change in laws and policies that may lead to a change in the unequal distribution. At the same time, there has been a resurgence of patriarchal norms, including around care work, leading to a regression in women’s rights and gender equality. Feminist activism in order to counter this backlash has taken several forms - from visible movements advocating for specific care policies, to coalitions of state and non-state actors coming together to make laws addressing care. This panel seeks to examine these two interlinked aspects: a) changes in care laws that have actually resulted from, or have been informed by feminist activism; and b) the use of care as a strategy of building solidarity and mobilisation. Papers in this panel will discuss how the practice of care as a feminist strategy can help counter backlash directed specifically at women’s organising; and how this organising in turn can result in certain care laws being formulated by the State. We will also cast an eye on future prospects for both designing care laws that confronts the issue of unequal distribution of care work, as well as for women’s movements seeking to use care as a strategy for building alliances.

Feminist scholars have long demonstrated the invisibility of women’s reproductive

labour, performed in bearing and raising children, maintaining households and socially sustaining male labour. The centrality of care to the fabric of human society has been underlined once again by the pandemic. Given that the state is a primary locus of feminist activism in rendering such unpaid work visible, the law becomes a crucial site of feminist struggle. On the one hand, the law mirrors economic arrangements in the market just as it mirrors familial arrangements, but on the other, it also plays a vital role in maintaining the invisibility of women’s unpaid work and paid work in the family and the market. Feminist legal scholars have long theorised the law through a critical lens across legal fields but also at various sites of feminist struggle including litigation, statutory law reform and by documenting the lived experiences of women as they interact with the legal system. The paper will offer an overview of the feminist legal theorising of care and reproductive labour in Anglo-American scholarship. The paper will then argue that any effort to value care necessitates a broader agenda of law reform which returns to the original feminist critique of marriage, and which therefore traverses the marriage/market and unpaid/paid care work spectrum. The paper will then turn to Indian courts’ recent articulations of “care jurisprudence” as it pertains to both paid and unpaid care work. As feminists put forth demands for investment in a care economy and alongside robust manifestos for the recognition and redistribution of care, the paper will highlight the central role of the law and possibilities for a reimagined care jurisprudence in furthering feminist goals.

his paper examines the strategies adopted by first-time women protestors participating in the 100-day Shaheen Bagh resistance against India’s discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act. It highlights women’s experiences of protesting for their and their children’s citizenship rights, and the impact that women’s presence in this struggle has made to it. The paper reflects on how women brought their caring roles into the public space of protests — thereby impacting the very form and nature of the struggle.

The paper will draw on interviews, field observations, and published material, to delineate the new forms of protest and strategies used by the women in Shaheen Bagh in response to what I term ‘cyclical’ backlash by the Indian state. During this protest, the women protestors initiated and used a myriad of established and innovative strategies against this backlash. The article will underscore the organically evolving nature of the strategies that women in Shaheen Bagh adopted, and highlight how the use of care in physical, digital, and figurative spaces became the hallmark of the Shaheen Bagh struggle. In this way, the paper shows how women protestors constructed Shaheen Bagh as a caring movement, and explains how a strategy of care was essential to the collective mobilisation and alliance building for them. In light of continuing state intolerance and shrinking space for civil society, this article concludes with reflections on lessons that future feminist resistance and organising can draw from this analysis, to be able to strike back against backlash.

This paper addresses itself to the question of when and how do feminist movements succeed (or not) in bringing about care policy change. It captures the successes and failures of feminist activism in the formulation of two care laws in India – the National Food Security Act, 2013 and the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017. Specifically, it traces the journey of the working group on Universal Maternity Entitlements within the Right to Food campaign and its decade long advocacy and engagement with the Indian State over the issue of maternity benefits and childcare services.

Findings suggest that feminist activism has successfully leveraged strategic political opportunities presented by India’s battle against child malnutrition and openings for increased state-civil society participatory governance. They have foregrounded health and food security as a key argument for expansion of maternity entitlements. However, this has come at the cost of furthering feminist goals on gender equality, wage security of informal women workers’ and redistribution of childcare. The passage of these two laws further confirms a labour segmentation policy paradigm that continues to separate employment-linked labour rights from broader social protection citizenship claims.

I argue that collaboration of State and non-state actors over maternity entitlements in India, have reinforced a public philosophy of mother-child as an indivisible dyad, effectively foreclosing discourses of paternity leave and fathers’ involvement in childcare. The recognition of women’s childcare roles in the absence of reduction or redistribution efforts, thwarts the full potential of Diane Elson’s Triple R framework (2008). I contend that feminists need to counter the risks of bolstering a maternalistic ethic of care by adopting a feminist political ethics of care as proposed in the work of Joan Tronto (1993).

This paper addresses the field of care in Latin America: it identifies its main authors, topics and policy proposals. It argues that the field was constituted as early as the 1990s under pressure from the ELAC, and has operated as a semi-autonomous field for the last thirty years, with few academic influences and little impact in the curricula. Most participants in the field are independent consultants that work under contract with ELAC. The authors most cited, although not considered an indispensable part of reporting, are Joan Tronto and Pascale Molinier.

The paper also argues that notwithstanding the little impact it has had in academic circles, it has had enormous policy impact. As it has been true in other cases, however, policies show more cooptation of the political energy of the term than real commitment to the agenda. Participants in the field have produced a significant amount of reports showing exactly the little impact that reforms have had on the distribution of power along gender lines.