Demand for domestic workers (i.e. workers engaged in care and general housekeeping activities) is on the rise in Europe. The demand is due to the interplay of various factors such as the ageing of the population, women’s participation in the labour market, inadequate public provision of care, as well as the unequal division of care […]

Video registration of the seminar “Paid domestic work: contemporary forms and past legacies,” organised by the Gender, Race & Sexuality Working Group at the European University Institute on 16 April 2014. Video and editing: Elena Borghi. Speakers: Swapna Banerjee, Vera Pavlou and Raffaella Sarti.

The idea that certain sexual acts were ‘unnatural’ goes back to Antiquity and by the Middle Ages had been formalised in the European world through Christian doctrine and canon law. It was absorbed into the laws of a number of modern European states, and exported legislatively to much of the world through colonial expansion. Looking back from 2014, the shift from severe punitive measures for sex ‘against nature’ to the recent introduction of same-sex marriage laws in close to twenty nations across five continents must rank as one of the fullest revolutions of official attitudes in modern history. It is a revolution that begs many broad questions. This conference seeks to develop fresh, historically-informed, international perspectives on coupling – broadly understood – as a phenomenon poised between ‘nature’ and state regulation, from the late eighteenth century to the present. […]