Global Governance of Time and Gender : The Biopolitics of Quantifying Care and Household Labor

This book shows how numbers shape what matters in global politics. Beier examines how international organizations measure unpaid care and housework through time use surveys and asks what gets lost or distorted in the process. Beier offers a critical account of how global governance (de)values care, time, and social reproduction.

For something to count in international politics, it must be measured. Indicators and statistics have become central tools through which international organizations define and govern social issues. Global Governance of Time and Gender challenges this logic by examining how care and household labor are made measurable and what is lost in the process. Tracing the development of time use studies from the nineteenth century to contemporary United Nations indicators, this book shows how the quantification of care operates as a technique of government. Rather than highlighting the value of unpaid care and household labor, these measurements produce divisions and hierarchies, shaping the very concepts of care, time, and value.Bringing together International Relations, governmentality studies, and queer feminist theory, Beier analyzes the governing of care as biopolitics, revealing how ostensibly neutral metrics are embedded in Eurocentric and patriarchal knowledge systems. This book introduces the concept of chronobiopolitics to capture how time, measurement, and power intersect in global governance. Combining historical analysis with theoretical innovation, Global Governance of Time and Gender demonstrates that quantification does not simply recognize care but actively devalues it. In doing so, it offers a critical account of international administrative practices that govern time and gender. It concludes by exploring feminist alternatives and proposing new ways of valuing care beyond dominant metrics.ABOUT THE SERIES: Voices in International Relations, published under the auspices of the European International Studies Association (EISA), furthers the development of research at the frontiers of International Relations (IR). It expands the remit of the field by including innovative scholarship that broadens key debates in the discipline, but it is more interested in reconfiguring such debates by approaching them from inside and outside the conventional core. Thematically, we aim to publish research that pushes the limits of IR conventionally defined from within and connects it to debates developing outside the discipline. We are committed to furthering diversity and inclusion in terms of authorship, location, topics and approaches from both inside and outside Europe. We have an inclusive approach to neighbouring disciplines, be it sociology, history, anthropology, geography, economics, political theory or law. Series editors: Debbie Lisle, Tanja Aalberts, Anna Leander, and Laura Sjoberg.