Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“more invisible forms of labour tend to remain unequally distributed even in supposedly egalitarian relationships. Owing to the link between the family form and the organisation of the waged economy, intimate notions of difference and broader social hierarchies continue to be reproduced.”

“teaching men to do reproductive labour, without challenging the conflicting needs and contradictions within capitalism, will only take us so far. Federici writes that 'trying to educate men has always meant that our struggle was privatized and fought in the solitude of our kitchens and bedrooms'. A problem with these strategies, then, is that they often appear as merely individual.”

“The bourgeois good life is reframed as an aspiration for the working class, retaining its normative and reactionary content. In the same way, equality politics tend to accept the domestic sphere as a given reality, merely reshuffling some of the work within this sphere, rather than trying to break down the divisions that separate domestic and waged work as such.”

“The model of a male bread-winner and a female homemaker has been superseded in the sphere of waged work, but assumptions relating to the provision of informal care have not necessarily changed." This means that the overarching responsibility for care still falls disproportionately on women. The paradigm of equality within mainstream feminism has translated into a double burden for women... ”

“Neoliberal political discourse often uses a gender-neutral language of equal access. But its invocations of 'individual responsibility' and 'community care' in fact depend on the reproduction of more or less normative family relationships and women's continued responsibility for unwaged reproductive labour. ...because liberal individualism simultaneously disavows and depends on the existence of reproductive labour.”

“Welfare-state feminism has worked to save the family from itself and its own logic of violence and exploitation. This form of feminism has always been heteronormative and white. It has taken a particular form of the family for granted while seeking to minimise the damage and hierarchy produced by it.”

“Just as social-democratic states have often worked to save capitalism from its own worst excesses, the feminist politics of the welfare state serve to protect the nuclear family from some of the contradictions that are inherent in this social form. In particular, it has sought to address the fact...families have never been able to do all of this work or meet the needs of all people.”

“Wages for Housework writers argue that career opportunities could never lead to liberation, as such 'solutions' to women's status as unwaged labour depend on someone else doing reproductive labour. These individualised solutions tend to create a racist hierarchy between 'modern', career-oriented white women and supposedly backwards migrant women doing reproductive work.”

“And doing waged work has not enabled women to refuse most unwaged work. While standards for unwaged work can be reduced, this work cannot be completely abandoned, as most people could not pay for all the reproductive services they need. Waged work is therefore performed on top of women's unwaged work. This double burden leaves less time for resisting exploitation."

“Wages for Housework understood lesbianism and paid sex work as ways to refuse doing the work of love for free. The lesbian refusal to sleep with men undermines men's power to command sexual labour. This does not mean that lesbianism is reducible to abstinence or refusal in the merely negative sense. Refusal is not a passive act of withdrawal of labour, but rather the construction of alternative ways of being.”

“ 'although the government tries to isolate our struggles, we refuse to be divided. All work is prostitution and we are all prostitutes. We are forced to sell our bodies - for room and board or for cash - in marriage, in the street, in typing pools or in factories.' ”

“organising autonomously becomes a way of politicising forms of care that already happen in oppressed groups which have been forced to develop systems of emotional resilience and mutual care to compensate for the harms caused by oppression and exploitation. This is also a way of building powerful movements where care is a central part of the political project.”

“The point, then, is not to plead with men or enlighten them, but to show that autonomous organising outside of waged work is a source of power for the working class. As Federici succinctly states: 'Power educates. First men will fear, then they will learn because capital will fear.' ”

“As Wages for Housework members state in their collectively authored 'Theses on Wages for Housework': 'Autonomy from men is Autonomy from capital that uses men's power to discipline us.' This practice sought to break with the emotional pressures of gendered relations — guilt and the internalised desire to be a good woman, responding to the authority of a man.”

“an antagonistic relation between a 'they' that mystifies these conditions and a 'we' that reveals seemingly disconnected incidents as part of the collective situation of feminised subjects. Neuroses and miscarriages are no longer private misfortunes but rather occupational diseases and work accidents. Smiles will not come for free anymore since they are expressions not of love but of a labour practice”

“Women are allowed to express anger within their 'proper domain' — that of the kitchen. It is when women's anger exceeds the privatised reproductive sphere that it becomes threatening to the emotional ordering of the world. Collective practices of anger have the potential to challenge the status quo.”

“In capitalist society, reproductive labour is deemed incompatible with sovereign subjectivity because this type of labour privileges the needs of others. Such needs, rather than individual will, become the orienting force of this labouring subject. Inhabiting sovereignty therefore means refusing the work of reproducing others.”

“Neoliberal society has brought with it an increased valuation of social flexibility. Flexibility has often been understood as detraditionalising gender, making gender expression appear less rigid. But such detraditionalisation does not necessarily mean that gender hierarchies disappear. Rather, they are reconstituted in new ways.”

“gender becomes a balancing act which often involves displacing the devalued labour of femininity onto other women. The disavowal of traditional femininity is mapped onto race, so that women of colour and migrant women are constructed as inhabiting a more backwards type of femininity compared to the supposedly modern and sovereign subjectivity that white bourgeois women can claim.”

“As femininity is simultaneously rewarded and devalued, professional women might find themselves in a double bind. In many cases these women are pressured to distance themselves from reproductive labour and traditional femininity while at the same time preserving some aspects of it so as not to appear as gender deviants.”

“Masculinity is produced not only through physical or intellectual labour but also through the typically feminised work of emotion management. Feminised workers are mainly made to absorb anger and frustration without... externalising it and displacing it onto someone else. Masculinity, on the other hand, works through the displacement of anger onto others, as it has a seeming monopoly on aggression and violence.”

“Feminised forms of labour function to decrease the degree of perceived agency that labouring subjects possess, as their emotional expression is understood not as making something happen in the world but merely as a reflection of their own susceptibility to emotion. Conversely, those who have their emotional needs catered to come to understand themselves as socially valued and having the power to change things.”

“Customers were much more likely to unburden their negative emotion, such as anger and distress, on female service workers. Shiloh Whitney writes that emotional labour does not necessarily create a good feeling in the customer but often invites the customer to offload negative feeling onto the worker.;Women are expected to show deference to customers, especially male customers, and to respond to abuse with a smile.”

“feminized labour has become increasingly commodified. Gender and status are not pre-given in the labour process but rather continually enforced through gendered agency. Gender is produced by the active participation of workers in certain tasks and through their relations to other people. In Hochschild's study, male flight attendants were less likely to be the targets of negative emotion.”

“The fact that women are generally more trained in handling the feelings of both self and others does not imply that men are less emotional. But emotions are expressed, perceived, and interpreted in gendered ways.”

“This idea mobilises the trope of men as emotionally inexpressive what Stephanie Shields calls the paradigm of masculinity as self-control. Men can reinforce their power by withholding emotional expression. This also means that women often have to rely on other women for emotional support.”

“Men tend to feel more entitled to their partner's nurturance than women do. This runs contrary to the received knowledge that women are more emotionally demanding in intimate relationships. According to this understanding of heterosexual love, men express their love differently, and it is unfair of women to demand full reciprocity.”

“There is a circular association of femininity and emotion in which femininity is devalued because of its connection with emotionality while emotion becomes devalued when coded as feminine.”

“Hochschild writes that when men express anger, 'it is deemed "rational" or understandable anger, anger that indicates not weakness of character but deeply held conviction'. In contrast, 'women's feelings are not seen as a response to real events but as reflections of themselves as "emotional" ”

“Men use the confidence they gain from their female partner's emotional support to position themselves as superior to their partner. This does not mean that women are to blame for their own oppression, but neither are they passive victims of gender oppression and exploitation. Rather, women tend to actively participate in the continual reproduction of a reality based on gender hierarchy.”