Postpartum geographies: Intersections of academic labor and care work

Abstract

Academic work and care work are deeply entangled modes of labor. For parent-academics, these entanglements are particularly knotted during the postpartum period, when care work responsibilities intensify, increasingly under precarious labor conditions. Postpartum care work—whether conducted by oneself or by someone else—both encroaches upon and makes possible academic work, resulting in blurred spatiotemporal divisions between the two. This article draws on autoethnography and participant observation to map out a postpartum geography of care work and academic work in academia. It does so by examining three key sites in/of the university where care work and academic work intersect—bathrooms, campus daycare centers, and the internet—and by considering three kinds of work that happen there—milk-work, childcare work, and connection-work. In these three sites in particular, I argue, the intellectual work and the care work that sustain the university spill over into one another. Furthermore, each of these geographic sites can manifest as sites of care, access, labor, and surveillance, often simultaneously and always depending on the gendered, raced, classed, and dis/abled positionality of those moving in and through them. By advancing an understanding of (postpartum) reproductive rights as workers’ rights, this paper also envisions more intersectional and coalitional feminist labor solidarities across campus.