CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Gogberashvili, Ani |
|---|---|
| Title | Gendered Experience of Time in Georgia: Motherhood, Care Work and the Life Beyond |
| Summary | First, associated with the cycles of nature, later with the emergence of capitalism, the perception of time became associated with the linearity of the production process and became commodified. Time as a resource, reflecting the power relations, is distributed unequally within the groups of people, with some spending most of the time working to ensure survival, while others are enjoying vast amounts of discretionary time. In contemporary society, the lack of time is especially acute in the lives of working mothers. The persistent essentialist understanding of motherhood still requires women to devote most of their time beyond paid employment to caregiving, and the standard working hours not taking the time needed for care responsibilities into account. This thesis explores the time poverty experienced by working mothers in Georgia who, due to unregulated working hours and the demands of motherhood, enjoy little to no temporal autonomy. The aim of the research is to analyze the perceptions of time for them and study the ways in which they distribute their time between paid labor, unpaid labor, and leisure and the reasoning behind this arrangement. I argue that the perception of time for working mothers in Georgia, shaped by the essentialist understanding of motherhood, is malleable and adaptable to immediate circumstances, different from the rigidity of capitalist temporality. The data collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews suggest that women perceive time poverty as their individual problem instead of questioning structural inequality leading to this condition; respondents assume that they have more control over their time than they actually do. Over the years, they have adopted different time management and time-saving strategies in order to utilize their time beyond paid employment and meet the contradictory standards of a good employee and a good mother. For this, they often have to juggle several tasks at a time, seek paid or unpaid help from other females, sacrifice their professional growth and leisure time, and put extensive effort into scheduling every minute of their days. |
| Supervisor | Éva Fodor, Dorottya Szikra |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/gogberashvili_ani.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University