Gender commodification and precarity in Portuguese call centres: the (re)production of inequality

Abstract

In this article I examine the extent to which gender is a commodity in the Portuguese call centre regime of value creation; and how gendered products of labour are embedded in both historical local gender idioms and neoliberal trends associated with recent class and employment restructurings of the European economy (precarity). Despite the existence of some formal academic studies and various activist essays in web-based journals focusing on the gendered nature of precarious work, the empirical analysis and theoretical articulation of immaterial labour regimes of value creation, precarity and gender relations remains underdeveloped. This omission in the available literature greatly contributes to an implicit acceptance of immateriality and precarity as gender-neutral realms, an assumption which, as I show in this article, may lead to faulty understandings regarding contextual specificities in the constitution of gendered neoliberal subjectivities and inequalities.