Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“Heterosexuality can be understood as a form of discipline, or a work ethic. It is from this work, and the approval that comes from it, that women learn to derive their sense of identity, their sense of being 'real women'. Queer women are often excluded from the social rewards that come with performing feminised labour in normative ways.”

“Brown notes that the ideal of the white bourgeois family functions as a disciplinary norm against which black... black women in particular, are pathologised. This in turn justifies intense state surveillance of those women deemed deviant, as well as state intervention, such as the loss of custody of one's children, forced sterilisation, or the loss of benefits, if one does not do reproductive labour the right way.”

“When women fail to enjoy or start resisting gendered work, they are met with various kinds of violence, both physical and emotional. One form of violence is the pathologisation of women's resistance to emotional labour. ... Those who fail to perform and enjoy the naturalised labour of femininity, then, are likely to be pathologised, even criminalised.”

“As violence takes on the appearance of love, it becomes a tool for disciplining women's emotional labour. As Federici puts it, men can 'supervise our sexual work, to ensure that we would provide sexual services according to the established, socially sanctioned productivity norms'. They can thus lay claim to women's bodies, energy, and time.”

“The rise of capitalism created the conditions for the exploitation of reproductive labour as we know it. Capitalist extraction of surplus value depends on spheres of non-value.”

“The compounded vulnerabilities of race, gender, and class leave working-class women of colour particularly likely to be exploited in the most strenuous and least valued types of reproductive labour. It is a way in which, as Dorothy Roberts suggests, some women's greater equality with men can lead to increased hierarchy and exploitation among women. ”

“We can see this in the organisation of the so-called informal economy, where labour is not organised by contractual wage relations... Another example is when white, bourgeois, middle-class women transfer some of their domestic duties onto more marginalised workers. This is a form of exploitation based on surplus labour, constituted mainly along lines of race, migration status, and class.”

“Heterosexual arrangements are exploitative in ways that benefit capital but also benefit men. It is crucial for the existence of this particular exploitative relation that it appears to be outside of capitalist monetary relations, and that it therefore appears as a natural and private bond of love.”

“Gender is an inherently exploitative relation women as a group are exploited by men as a group. Not all women are exploited nor are they all exploited to the same extent. Not all men benefit from the exploitation of women in comparable ways. But all feminised subjects are affected by the exploitation of a majority of women.”

“Men are thus excused from performing much of the work of caring for others, and can generally do less emotional work. There is a tendency to distribute the burden of reproductive labour onto feminised subjects and the rewards of such labour onto men.”

“Men also perform gendered labour, but of a different type. Within the domestic sphere, men tend to specialise in work that involves heavy lifting or technical skill, such as fixing things that are broken. The work of masculinity tends to affirm the independence and competence of the subject, rather than its subordination to the needs of others.”

“Not only have feminised subjects been made responsible for reproductive labour, but they also tend to have a primary responsibility for reproducing gender as such. This involves the work of affirming and enhancing other people's gender presentation. In heterosexual relationships in particular, women are tasked with the role of affirming their partner as a 'real man'. ”

“Gender is... understood as... authentic self rather than as a form of labour that needs to be constantly repeated. Federici writes that housework 'has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character'. ...seen as something coming from within the subject itself thus seen as external imposition.”

“Wilmette Brown explores how gendered ideals are co-constitutive with whiteness: 'White women are the legitimate objects of beauty, of love, of femininity. Black women are not. While the modern, capitalist construction of femininity is based on an idealised notion of white, heterosexual, and bourgeois women, it functions as a disciplinary tool cutting across race and class.”

“While gendered relations are exploitative for most women, they can also produce rewards for those who do gender well, in particular for white, bourgeois, heterosexual women who are able to perform femininity more or less according to normative standards. Failure or refusal to live up to these norms can lead to violent punishment. ”

“...as modern understandings of gendered difference have anchored hierarchies of gender in bodily types. The naturalisation of difference has led to an understanding of gender as inevitable biological destiny. This serves to hide women's work as work, and instead conflates this labour with women's bodies and personalities.”

“Women tend to be perceived, and perceive themselves, as more caring than men. Their very personalities therefore become conflated with a specific type of work: emotional reproduction.”

“Our self-understanding of what types of work we can do, what skills we have, is closely linked to how we perceive ourselves as gendered subjects... the process of becoming a properly gendered subject can itself be understood as a form of work — the labour we do on ourselves to manage our relation to gendered norms. Sometimes we work to live up to such norms, and sometimes we work to distance ourselves from them.”

“In this way, the gendering of feeling reproduces a split subjectivity where women are tasked with creating relationality and emotional wellbeing, while men have licence to act as solitary individuals, affirming their own importance and worth over others.”

“Women are called to perform these tasks in their families, at work, and among friends and acquaintances. Niceness is a bourgeois family value which women are compelled to create through both domestic and emotional labour.”

“For people to feel well, someone needs to create good feelings. These feelings of niceness are a core function of the bourgeois family. There can be a lot of work involved in creating a spirit of niceness at family dinners and holidays, where conflict needs to be held at bay. It is also a key feminine task - smoothing over conflict, soothing hurt feelings, creating a spirit of relaxation and wellbeing.”

“The point is... to undo the material and ideological lines between the domestic and the public, the reproductive and the productive, as these divisions currently serve to individualise responsibility and enable exploitation. Such undoing challenges the organisation of the totality of the capitalist circuit. Capital would not be able to fully internalise the cost of reproductive labour without becoming unprofitable.”

“Through unwaged work, expensive reproductive resources, and 'individual responsibility', capital has externalised much of the cost of reproducing the labour force.”

“Struggles against unwaged reproduction thus risk harming those who are recipients of care, or risk increasing the exploitation of other reproductive workers while not threatening capital or the state. We need reproductive struggles that can address the concerns of reproductive work without displacing the potential harm of such struggles onto more marginalised groups, either recipients or workers.”

“Fighting for the right to abortion, for example, has been a way of challenging the imperative to reproduce for capitalism. But some (mainly racialised and disabled) people are marked as undesirable reproductive subjects within racial-capitalist reproductive norms.”

“In Kathi Weeks's terms, this naming constitutes a feminist subjectivity simultaneously created by and against the social relations of work. As she puts it, struggles within the sphere of reproduction depend on our ability to create a distance between what we have been made into and what we could become.”

“As members of the English Wages for Housework collective write, 'The routines of capitalist life have always given capital the appearance of naturalness (as if life couldn't be any other way) and the appearance of viability (as if nothing else could work as well).' They add that 'halting service work undermines this appearance of social peace'. ”

“Especially for those responsible for the reproduction of others, there is little material support for choices other than the most normative. For instance, there are very few options in terms of affordable childcare, and many people do not have personal relationships that could support childcare arrangements outside of the nuclear family.”

“The reproductive crisis in the nineteenth century, when the working class was struggling to reproduce itself, in time led to improved conditions of reproduction for many sections of the population. This happened both through higher standards of housing and reproductive services and through an increase in the time that working-class women were expected to devote to taking care of their families.”

“While the state and capital have always sought to regulate the reproduction of the working class, this sphere of life has often appeared as an entirely private matter. Reproduction has come to appear as non-political in a way that conceals its contradictions and antagonisms. This privatisation obscures the... character of reproduction under capitalism, making current reproductive forms seem natural and desirable.”