Cullen, Pauline (2024) Minoritized mother politicians in Ireland: Subjectivities and subjectivation in the political workplace. Gender, Work & Organization. ISSN 0968-6673

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Abstract

Minoritized mother politicians that include ethnic racialized minority Traveller (an Irish indigenous community), racialized ethnic minority women, and migrant women face considerable disadvantages as workers arising from the intersection of their maternal status, gender, racialized or migrant and class position. The experiences of minoritized mother candidates and politicians in Ireland are viewed through the lens of subjectivities providing insight into how these mother-workers mediate identities and status positions that place them outside of, or in tension with, a predominantly white masculinist workplace. Empirical data analysis reveals how minoritized mother candidates and politicians respond in strategic ways to forces of subjectivation that may risk affirming idealized motherhood, while obscuring gendered and racialized inequalities in the political workplace. Paradoxically, motherhood seeds political ambition while acting as a material, temporal, and affective constraint, a source of invisible labor and violence in gendered and racialized ways. However, minoritized mothers' presence and representations also offer an important challenge to this white masculinist workplace.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Ireland; maternalism; minoritized mothers; political workplace; subjectivity;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology
Item ID:	18606
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13159
Depositing User:	Dr. Pauline Cullen
Date Deposited:	04 Jun 2024 15:11
Journal or Publication Title:	Gender, Work & Organization
Publisher:	Wiley
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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