Kim Lopez
Bio
Dr. Lopez critically examines social structures that reinforce difference and marginalisation. As a community-engaged qualitative scholar, she values working collaboratively and creatively to know more about: leisure and self-care in caring work, invisibility in caring labour, aging well in long-term care homes, leisure in and through helping professions, and digital leisure technologies. With a background in facilitating inclusive leisure and recreation experiences, Dr. Lopez is committed to social change through transformational inquiry, inclusive organisation, advocacy, and activism. Guided by intersectionality, critical race and feminist theories, her current research with women of colour uses narrative methods (body maps and digital stories) to discuss the ways racialising, gendering, and classing occurs through caring labour and the impacts of these social processes.
I don’t dream of labour: Gender, Anti-Work, and the Social Reproduction of Labouring Bodies
Women of colour are conditioned to be “good” workers. We are scheduled, culturally schooled, and disciplined to be as productive as possible and incur harm and violence in the various forms of reproductive work we engage. While resistances to labour toward leisure might seem like a health-full alternative to the harms of capitalism; activity and free-time alone cannot serve as the carrot that leads us away from labour, which for many, is a system of exploitation that is so deeply embedded in how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the world. What, then, does escaping labour look like? What might anti-work existences feel like? How might our engagement in the world be different if the relationship between work and gender was radically reorganized?
Keywords
genderacialized labour, social reproduction theory, labouring bodies, leisure, anti-work
location
In-person
Hagey Hall room 334
3:00 pm - 4;30 pm
Remote
Zoom link
Meeting ID: 942 9169 9655
Passcode: 374998