Legal Form and Temporal Rationalities in UK Work–Life Balance Law

Abstract

This article attempts to crack open the temporal assumptions in the goal of ‘balancing’ work and family, as it is mobilised in UK law. Within studies of gender and labour, ‘balance’, as a concept and a politico-legal objective, is worthy of much more scholarly attention than it has received to date. In the UK context, balance is understood as a means of achieving equilibrium, both at the level of the labour market and within the context of unpaid care. Specifically, mobilising the short horizon of a ‘reckonable present’, balance creates a paradigm or topos through which dilemmas of value and care can be played out and resolved. The specific qualities of the UK's right to request flexible work, for its part, indicate that law's temporal qualities can have specific regulatory functions, shifting scale and reframing responsibilities. By looking closely at legal technicalities, we can discern much about the conceptual logic that affects many of us through influential regulatory strategies. The political imperative of analysing work–life balance might, in this way, require us to return not only to time, but also, strangely, to legal form.     

Souls intact: The soul performances of Audre Lorde,Aretha Franklin,and Nina Simone

This article redefines and regenders the meaning of soul in black expressive culture. The author argues that by the late 1960s the term encodes a narrative whereby racialized struggle yields a culturally superior style, and it shows how black women artists use literary and musical techniques to perform this recuperative alchemy. Reading Audre Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami as a paradigmatic soul text, the author contends that this text invites us to deprioritize concerns about the commodification of soul and to show instead how precisely black women artists such as Lorde, Nina Simone, and Aretha Franklin draw energy from the movement of the spiritual into the secular to create virtuosic, inclusive, and transformative forms of survivorship; the article suggests that they do so by weaving many genres together to create a home out of no home in the body, on the page, and on the stage. This analysis challenges interpretations of soul that privilege its marketization and appropriation and that reproduce a masculinist, heteronormative account, either as “fact,” in histories of popular music, or as the grounds for critique, in recent scholarship on “post-soul aesthetics.”     

Soldiers of Faith behind the Lines: religious women and community patriotism during the First World War in France

On the eve of World War I, considerable tensions existed among French Catholics, Protestants, and Jews and between Catholics and the French state. The crisis provoked by the First World War allowed these faith groups to prove their worth to France through adherence to the Union sacrée. The wartime activities of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish women became important symbols of each faith community's solidarity with France. The war made women representatives of their communities' devotion to France. Religious communities' portrayal of their women's wartime work illuminates the divergent goals for the Union sacrée among different faith communities.