Heading home: Fantasies and injuries of motherhood and work

Shani Orgad is Professor of Media and Communications at LSE. She writes and teaches about media, culture, gender and inequality. Orgad is the author of several books including Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality (2019, Columbia University Press), Media Representation and the Global Imagination (2012, Polity) and Storytelling Online: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet (2005, Peter Lang). Her forthcoming book (with Rosalind Gill) Confidence Culture will be published in 2022 by Duke University Press. 

In this talk, Shani Orgad will discuss her book Heading Home: Motherhood, Work, and the Failed Promise of Equality (Columbia University Press, 2019), which draws on in-depth interviews with London educated mothers who left paid employment and explores how their accounts relate to media and policy discourses. Orgad will discuss the stark disjuncture that her study revealed between the promise of gender equality a fantasy circulated through cultural, media, workplace and policy discourses and these mothers’ painful experience of continued injustice both at work and at home. She will show how although these women’s experiences often fly in the face of contemporary ideals of having it all, work-life balance, self-confidence, good mothering, working in the gig economy, and marriage as an egalitarian partnership, they continue to interpret and judge themselves through these same ideals. 

This webinar is part of an open webinar series, hosted by CISC. To discover more please visit the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship and follow the Centre on Twitter.