Care-based temporalities and parental leave in Australia

This article analyses the legal temporalities imposed by Australia’s parental leave system with reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s approach to temporal embodiment. It focuses on the temporal issues surrounding Australia’s parental leave pay scheme and demonstrates the legislation’s inadequacies in incorporating women’s reflexive temporal experiences of maternity into legal and temporal boundary making. This article identifies the problematic issues in the existing parental leave pay legislation as ones based on time and argues that there is one dominant conception of time in the legislation, neo-maternalistic productivism. The ideology of neo-maternalistic productivism advances a hegemonic time that structures women’s role as subservient to the productivistic regime of Australia’s neoliberal capitalism. I suggest an alternative temporal model drawing on a Bourdieusian analysis of care-based temporalities. This expansive approach to time shifts standards to accept that lived experiences of time often do not adhere to the ideal worker’s waged work trajectory.