Prof. Dr. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez is a Professor in Sociology with a focus on Culture and Migration at the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. Previously to this position, she was Professor in General Sociology at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. She has published widely on gender, migration, and care work, and engages post Marxist and decolonial perspectives, feminist and queer epistemologies. She has been an early and staunch advocate of decolonial theory in the German-speaking world. Among her many publications is the book Migration, Domestic Work and Affect, published by Routledge (2010). More recently she has published with Shirley Anne Tate the Palgrave Handbook in Critical Race and Gender and with Rhoda Reddock Decolonial Perspectives on Entangled Inequalities: Europe and the Caribbean as well as with Pınar Tuzcu Migrantischer Feminismus in der deutschen Frauenbewegung. Her work engages with entangled migrations with a focus on German migration to Brazil, affective labor, materialities, institutional racism, racial capitalism and the coloniality of migration.

Affective Labour and Decolonial Mourning: Reproductive Labour between Biopolitics and Necropolitics

This paper discusses reproductive labour by focusing on the affective labour of decolonial anti-racist trans-feminist political struggles. It does so by first engaging with care work and in a second step discussing Trauerarbeit, the labour of mourning that is realized in order to bear witness and speak justice. In this sense, the paper looks at reproductive labour by raising questions regarding its biopolitical force, but also its necropolitical underpinnings. Ultimately, it engages with the practices of a caring commons.