CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Mazzotti, Barbara |
|---|---|
| Title | Fertility Politics and Postfordist System in Italy: Precarity, Feminization of Labour and the Biopolitical Womb |
| Summary | To grasp the meaning of fertility politics in an economic context, this research focuses on the shift from a Fordist to a postfordist mode of production through the analysis of the technologies enacted by biopower. Foucault’s notion of technologies of production, are strictly related to the technologies of sign systems, to the technologies of power and to the technologies of the self, as tools of governance and production of meanings in western societies. Analysing fertility politics in contemporary Italy, we try to connect the market, i.e., the postfordist neoliberal economy, to the biopolitical understanding of these technologies. How does the regulation of fertility changes according to the technological arrangement of production? The attempt to answer this question requires an analysis of how technologies are mutually functioning to sustain a certain biopower which, we claim, collapsed in the realm of economy, when feminization of labour became the technology to maintain the neoliberal competition, supplied by the flexibilization of labour force. Also, a certain account of biopower, localizes in the womb the space of exception in which the logic of biopower itself enacts the regulation of populations and defines women as new “neutral” subjects of politics. We claim that this primary position of the womb and of women in the realm of politics over life can be recognized in the phenomenon of feminization of labour. We conclude that the internalization of competition, at stake for the neoliberal economy, works through a form of subjectification which counts on self-regulation of the wombs. Women's position becomes the one of seeking for a successful maternity, which is discouraged by the labour system and promoted by the main discourses about birth-rate and modernization. Women, “those at risk”, become also the reproducer of social classes, and this has structural implications with certain constructions of citizenship, race and migration, as of precarization of labour. |
| Supervisor | Anna Loutfi |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/mazzotti_barbara.pdf |
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