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The Cultural, the Sexual, and the Gendering of the Labour Market

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Sexualizing the Social

Part of the book series: Explorations in Sociology. ((EIS))

Abstract

In this chapter, we want to explore the complex relations between culture, sexuality and gender in feminist theorizations of the labour market. To begin to do this, we turn first to early feminist analyses of the labour market, including Barrett (1980) and Cockburn (1981). We explore what we see to be their restricted understandings of the social as an analytic category in the explanation of gender, restrictions which, in later work made possible the hollowing out of the social, and led to its abandonment and replacement by the cultural. We see this trajectory as having led to limited understandings of the gendering of the labour market, especially visible in the investigation of the significance of sexuality in the organization of the labour market.

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© 1996 British Sociological Association

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Adkins, L., Lury, C. (1996). The Cultural, the Sexual, and the Gendering of the Labour Market. In: Adkins, L., Merchant, V. (eds) Sexualizing the Social. Explorations in Sociology.. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24549-9_11

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