Politics of (Not) Caring: Gender, Subjectivity, and Care Work in Doctors' Protests

Dear members of the GREG community,

We are pleased to invite you to our next Level-Up seminar, taking place on November 13, from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. The event will feature a presentation by Professor Ayesha Masood (Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan). Professor Masood will share her latest research, titled "Politics of (Not) Caring: Gender, Subjectivity, and Care Work in Doctors' Protests."

Online: Teams link

Abstract: The past decade has seen a sharp increase in the number of conflicts, violence and protests involving healthcare professionals across the world. Importantly, the majority of these protests are a direct response to chronic resource shortages, understaffing, poor working conditions and care extraction in the healthcare industry. Previous research has examined these protests predominantly in the context of class and labor conflict. Due to the encroachment of neoliberalism and New Public Management, collective actions like strikes and protests have migrated from manufacturing to service industry, where the bargaining power is based not on the number of workdays lost, or number of strikers involved, but on the harm caused to the users of the services. Protests by healthcare professionals thus involve a form of politicization of caring: where collective action necessitates reframing the labor agendas of better working conditions and higher pay in the form of patient advocacy. Relatedly, research on nursing, a traditionally women dominant profession, has noted how the patriarchal social structures and gendered nature of work in healthcare overlap with neoliberal policies to intensify care extraction and further devaluation of care work. Research on protests by nurses highlights the gendered aspects of this collective action, showing how these movements allowed nurses to renegotiate different gendered subjectivities and challenge the idea of a largely docile workforce.

My research draws on this context, examining the participation of women doctors in various healthcare worker organizations in Pakistan, particularly the Young Doctors’ Association (YDA) and the Grand Health Alliance. YDA is a movement started by junior doctors in Pakistan in response to poor working conditions, low pay, and a lack of job opportunities. Since its inception in 2007, YDA has been responsible for multiple protests and strikes primarily directed against the government. I will present ethnographic data collected between 2015 and 2021 through interviews and participant observation in public hospitals in Punjab, Pakistan. I discuss how YDA uses gendered scripts of work and gendered bodies in their protests: They frequently use the security of female patients and doctors as a point of contention. At the same time, they try to frame medical work as a matter of professionalism rather than as virtue or care work. I further discuss how women doctors have largely remained ambivalent about the movement. Although more than 50% of all doctors are women, they remain largely absent from YDA’s leadership and its protests. Based on my interviews, I discuss how women frame their non-participation as a gendered form of political activism based on silence and abstention rather than vocal engagement. In doing so, they simultaneously resist YDA’s appropriation of care work and their claim to legitimacy as the sole spokespeople for doctors and patients. By examining the role of women in healthcare worker protest, my research extends this discussion to consider the gendered forms of protest, mobilization and activism.