Before starting my role at the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (GSF) program, I lived on Gadigal country in Sydney, where I received my Ph.D. in an interdisciplinary program in Social and Political Thought at the Institute for Social Justice. Having grown up in Austria, I am now used to the Sydney climate and look forward to a Northern Hemisphere fall and winter with a mix of excitement and horror. Along with my postdoctoral colleague Ingrid Meintjes, I am part of the “Rethinking Global Economies of Care” (RGEC) research network that is taking form under the lead of GSF’s Jocelyn Olcott. I am co-teaching a vertically integrated Bass Connection project this year with undergraduate and graduate students, am participating in a graduate seminar led by Jocelyn Olcott and Ara Wilson, as well as working on grant applications for the RGEC. I am also co-organizing a meeting of the RGEC with international partner networks at Duke in April 2020.
I have just presented a paper at this year’s FEAST conference and will soon discuss my work in the Pre-Print series at GSF. In my previous work on the outsourcing of social reproduction – particularly domestic cleaning –, I investigate the practices of men (and women) in Viennese, opposite-sex couple households that pay for domestic services in the international division of reproductive labor (IDRL). Until recently, men’s practices as both employers and employees in the IDRL remained largely under-investigated, a fact that discursively reproduces domestic and care work as a “women’s issue.” I propose to look at the IDRL through a lens of epistemic ignorance, or practices of “active unknowing.” These epistemic practices are not merely a question of situated – gendered – knowledge but follow more complex epistemic patterns in the “coloniality of labor.”
In my new project, “Epistemologies of Caring Masculinities,” I turn away from the epistemically ignorant practices of members of outsourcing households and engage with the positive epistemic implications that arise out of embodied domestic work that men perform within their households. What do men learn when they engaged in the work of social reproduction? And are the processes of this learning or the content of the knowledge acquired gender specific? Investigating the relationship between knowledge formation and embodied domestic and care practices, I straddle the boundaries of empirical research and conceptual work, by bringing together ethnographic work on masculinities and care with alternative epistemologies that locate knowledge formation processes in concrete, embodied, and everyday experience.