Minoritized mother politicians in Ireland: Subjectivities and subjectivation in the political workplace

Pauline Cullen

Gender, Work and Organization, 2025, vol. 32, issue 1, 389-407

Abstract: Minoritized mother politicians that include ethnic racialized minority Traveller (an Irish indigenous community), racialized ethnic minority women, and migrant women face considerable disadvantages as workers arising from the intersection of their maternal status, gender, racialized or migrant and class position. The experiences of minoritized mother candidates and politicians in Ireland are viewed through the lens of subjectivities providing insight into how these mother‐workers mediate identities and status positions that place them outside of, or in tension with, a predominantly white masculinist workplace. Empirical data analysis reveals how minoritized mother candidates and politicians respond in strategic ways to forces of subjectivation that may risk affirming idealized motherhood, while obscuring gendered and racialized inequalities in the political workplace. Paradoxically, motherhood seeds political ambition while acting as a material, temporal, and affective constraint, a source of invisible labor and violence in gendered and racialized ways. However, minoritized mothers' presence and representations also offer an important challenge to this white masculinist workplace.

Date: 2025
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.13159

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:gender:v:32:y:2025:i:1:p:389-407

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0968-6673

Access Statistics for this article

Gender, Work and Organization is currently edited by David Knights, Deborah Kerfoot and Ida Sabelis

More articles in Gender, Work and Organization from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().