This book explores two unique studies of women's economic behaviour during Australia's COVID-19 crisis. The first describes the care 'frontline' in the feminised labor sectors of healthcare and education, identifying extreme workload pressures, deteriorating conditions, and a shockingly high incidence of workplace bullying: including women targeting other women workers. The author argues workplace cultures are almost inevitable in Australia's advanced neoliberal economy, where a patri-colonial legacy continues to devalue and under-resource women's work.
In contrast, a second study of voluntary care provisioning taking place in 'hyperlocal digital sharing networks' over the same period identifies very different economic behaviours. Here, women - and occasionally men - instead engage in 'care-full' labors of gifting, collective provisioning, and hive mind problem-solving, that align with the gift economy models seen in degrowth theory.
Utilizing decolonial feminisms and the lens of degrowth, the author identifies economic behaviours that subvert Australia's neo-liberal, neo-patriarchal culture, gift economy practices that may yet offer a real alternative to the destructive dynamisms of growth capitalism in a still-patriarchal, 'settler' culture, where entrenched hierarchies typically serve those at the top.
Responding to the economic fundamentalism of late-stage growth capitalism, this book asks the reader whether a '(re)matriation' of (Australian) culture is not only possible but might even present a transformative and paradigmatic 'gift highway', a blueprint moving us beyond the destructive hierarchies of the modern workplace towards a degrowth future.
This book will interest scholars in gender studies, sociology, and economics, particularly those interested in care work, the gift economy, and women's labor.
