Its critics call it ‘feminism-as-crime-control’, or ‘Governance Feminism’, diagnosing it as a pernicious form of identity politics. Its advocates call it taking sexual violence seriously – by which they mean wielding the power of the state to ‘punish perpetrators’ and ‘protect vulnerable women’. Both sides agree that this approach follows from the radical feminist analysis of sexual violence most strikingly formulated by Catharine MacKinnon. The aim of this paper is to rethink the Governance Feminism debate by questioning this common presupposition. (...) I ask whether taking MacKinnon’s analysis of sexual violence seriously might, in fact, itself give us reason to be critical of political strategies that embrace the punitive state. By raising this question, I hope to persuade radical feminists to listen to critics of carceral politics rather than dismissing them as rape apologists, and critics of carceral politics to listen to radical feminists rather than dismissing them as state apologists. (shrink)

In Northern Canada, Indigenous mixed economies persist alongside and in resistance to capital accumulation. The day-to-day sites and processes of colonial struggle, and, in particular, their gendered nature, are too often ignored. This piece takes an anti-colonial materialist approach to the multiple labours of Indigenous women in Canada, arguing that their social-reproductive labour is a primary site of struggle: a site of violent capitalist accumulation and persistent decolonising resistance. In making this argument, this piece draws on social-reproduction feminism, and anti-racist, (...) Indigenous and anti-colonial feminism, asking what it means to take an anti-colonial approach to social-reproduction feminism. It presents an expanded conception of production that encompasses not just the dialectic of capitalist production and reproduction, but also non-capitalist, subsistence production. An anti-colonial approach to social-reproduction feminism challenges one to think through questions of non-capitalist labour and the way different forms of labour persist relationally, reproducing and resisting capitalist modes of production. (shrink)

Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, customary justice, and not-so-timely reparations. Our thoughts take us through the different (...) ways that openness and closure work in struggles against violence, cruel welcomes, and re-arrangements of code and custom. Secondly, we share some reflections on methodological openness and closure as the roundtable conversation on asylum, and the interview with Riles, remind us of #FLaK2016 and its method of scattering sources as we think about how best to mix knowledges. Thirdly, prompted by the FLaK kitchen table conversations on openness, publishing and ‘getting the word out’, we respond to Kember’s call to ‘open up open access’. We explain the different current arrangements for opening up FLS content and how green open access, the sharedit initiative, author request and publisher discretion present alternatives to gold open access. Finally drawing on Franklin and Spade, we show how there are a range of ‘wench tactics’—adapting gifts, stalling and resting—which we deploy as academic editors who are trying to have an impact on the access, use and circulation of our journal, even though we do not own the journal we edit. These wench tactics are alternatives to the more obvious or reported tactic of resignation, or withdrawing academic labour from editing and reviewing altogether. They help us think about brewing editorial time, what ambivalence over our 25th birthday might mean, and how to inhabit painful places. In this, we respond in our own impure, compromised way to da Silva’s call not to forget the native and slave as we do FLaK, and repurpose shrapnel, in our common commitments. (shrink)

The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capit...

Drawing on feminist labour law and political economy literature, I argue that it is crucial to interrogate the personal and territorial scope of labour. After discussing the “commodification” of care, global care chains, and body work, I claim that the territorial scope of labour law must be expanded beyond that nation state to include transnational processes. I use the idea of social reproduction both to illustrate and to examine some of the recurring regulatory dilemmas that plague labour markets. I argue (...) that unpaid care and domestic work performed in the household, typically by women, troubles the personal scope of labour law. I use the example of this specific type of personal service relation to illustrate my claim that the jurisdiction of labour law is historical and contingent, rather than conceptual and universal. I conclude by identifying some of the implications of redrawing the territorial and personal scope of labour law in light of feminist understandings of social reproduction. (shrink)

Reports from integrative researchers who have followed calls for sociotechnical integration emphasize that the potential of interdisciplinary collaboration to inflect the social shaping of technoscience is often constrained by their liminal position. Integrative researchers tend to be positioned as either adversarial outsiders or co-opted insiders. In an attempt to navigate these dynamics, we show that attending to affective disturbances can open up possibilities for productive engagements across disciplinary divides. Drawing on the work of Helen Verran, we analyze “disconcertment” in three (...) sociotechnical integration research studies. We develop a heuristic that weaves together disconcertment, affective labor, and responsivity to analyze the role of the body in interdisciplinary collaborations. We draw out how bodies do affective labor when generating responsivity between collaborators in moments of disconcertment. Responsive bodies can function as sensors, sources, and processors of disconcerting experiences of difference. We further show how attending to disconcertment can stimulate methodological choices to recognize, amplify, or minimize the difference between collaborators. Although these choices are context-dependent, each one examined generates responsivity that supports collaborators to readjust the technical in terms of the social. This analysis contributes to science and technology studies scholarship on the role of affect in successes and failures of interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

This paper describes and critically reflects on a participatory policy process which resulted in a government decision not to introduce genetically modified cotton in farmers’ fields in Mali. In January 2006, 45 Malian farmers gathered in Sikasso to deliberate on GM cotton and the future of farming in Mali. As an invited policy space convened by the government of Sikasso region, this first-time farmers' jury was unique in West Africa. It was known as l’ECID—Espace Citoyen d’Interpellation Démocratique —and it had (...) an unprecedented impact on the region. In this Deliberative and Inclusive Process, the ECID combined the citizens’ jury method with indigenous methods for debate and dialogue, including the traditional African palaver. The ECID brought together male and female producers representing every district in the Sikasso region of southern Mali, specialist witnesses from various continents and a panel of independent observers, as well as resource persons and members of the national and international press and media. As an experiment in deliberative democracy, the ECID of Sikasso aimed to give men and women farmers the opportunity to share knowledge on the benefits and risks of GM cotton, and make policy recommendations on the future of GM technology in Malian agriculture. Designed as a bottom-up and participatory process, the ECID’s outcomes significantly changed national policy on the release of GM technology and have had an enduring influence in Mali. In this paper, we describe our positionality as action researchers and co-organisers of the ECID. We explain the methodology used for the ECID of Sikasso and critically reflect on the safeguards that were put in place to ensure a balanced and trustworthy deliberative process. The ECID and its key outcomes are discussed in the context of the political economy of GM cotton in West Africa. Last, we briefly highlight the relevance of the ECID for current international debates on racism in the theory and practice deliberative democracy; the production of post-normal transdisciplinary knowledge for technology risk-assessments; and the politics of knowledge in participatory policy-making for food and agriculture. (shrink)

The future of work has become a pressing matter of concern: Researchers, business consultancies, and industrial companies are intensively studying how new work models could be best implemented to increase workplace flexibility and creativity. In particular, the agile model has become one of the “must-have” elements for re-organizing work practices, especially for technology development work. However, the implementation of agile work often comes together with strong presumptions: it is regarded as an inevitable tool that can be universally integrated into different (...) workplaces while having the same outcome of flexibility, transparency, and flattened hierarchies everywhere. This paper challenges such essentializing assumptions by turning agile work into a “matter of care.” We argue that care work occurs in contexts other than feminized reproductive work, namely, technology development. Drawing on concepts from feminist Science and Technology Studies and ethnographic research at agile technology development workplaces in Germany and Kenya, we examine what work it takes to actually keep up with the imperative of agile work. The analysis brings the often invisibilized care practices of human and nonhuman actors to the fore that are necessary to enact and stabilize the agile promises of flexibilization, co-working, and rapid prototyping. Revealing the caring sociotechnical relationships that are vital for working agile, we discuss the emergence of power asymmetries characterized by hierarchies of skills that are differently acknowledged in the daily work of technology development. The paper ends by speculating on the emancipatory potential of a care perspective, by which we seek to inspire careful Emancipatory Technology Studies. (shrink)

‘Intersectionality’ has now become a major feature of feminist scholarly work, despite continued debates surrounding its precise definition. Since the term was coined and the field established in the late 1980s, countless articles, volumes and conferences have grown out of it, heralding a new phase in feminist and gender studies. Over the past few years, however, the growing number of critiques leveled against intersectionality warrants us as feminists to pause and reflect on the trajectory the concept has taken and on (...) the ways in which it has traveled through time and space. Conceptualizing intersectionality as a traveling theory allows for these multiple critiques to be contextualized and addressed. It is argued that the context of the neoliberal academy plays a major role in the ways in which intersectionality has lost much of its critical potential in some of its usages today. It is further suggested that Marxist feminism offers an important means of grounding intersectionality critically and expanding intersectionality’s ability to engage with feminism transnationally. (shrink)

The 2011 Historical Materialism Conference in London saw the launch of a Marxist-Feminist set of panels. This issue is inspired by the success of those panels, and the remarkably sustained interest in reviving and moving beyond older debates and discussions. The special issue’s focus, Social-Reproduction Feminism, reflects and contextualises the ongoing work and engagement with that thematic that has threaded through the conferences in the 2010s. This Introduction provides a summary overview of the Social-Reproduction Feminism framework, situating it within Marxist-Feminist (...) thinking and politics more generally, and calls on readers to consider its promise and potential as an historical-materialist approach to understanding capitalist social relations in terms of an integrated totality. (shrink)

In the last few years, it has become a commonplace to state that domination takes place through a multiplicity of axes, where gender, class, race, and sexuality intersect with one another. While a lot of insightful empirical work is being done under the heading of intersectionality, it is very rarely linked to the anarchist tradition that preceded it. In this article, I would like to articulate this point by showing the usefulness but also the limits of the notion of intersectionality (...) to understand mechanisms of domination and then move on to argue for the need of an anarcha-feminist research program. Secondly, I will try to provide the philosophical framework for such an enterprise by arguing that it is in a Spinozist ontology of the transindividual that we can best find the conceptual resources for thinking about the plural nature of women’s bodies and thus of their oppression. This will allow me to attempt to articulate the question of ‘what it means to be a woman’ in pluralistic terms and thus also to defend a specifically feminist form of anarchism. In conclusion, I will go back to the anarcha-feminist tradition and will show why today it is the best possible ally of feminism in the pursuit of a critical theory of society. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 72-91, Spring 2021.

ABSTRACTThis contribution emphasises the importance of conditions of production and relations of production in Discourse Studies. It argues that rather than constituting an extra-discursive realm that simply belongs to the economic sphere of a social formation, conditions and relations of production present a veritable concern for Discourse Studies. They constitute two central concepts of Marxism, and grasp two intertwined processes that assure the survival of a specific mode of production. It is not only the conditions of production that need to (...) be reproduced under certain relations of production. It is also these relations themselves that need to be reproduced discursively and ideologically. Hence, conditions and relations of production and their reproduction are fundamentally material-discursive. In the early days of discourse analysis in France, both concepts and a Marxist take on production constituted an important point of reference. Here, the conditions of production of discourse were more than the setting, context or the situation semiotic material is produced in. In today's Discourse Studies, however, conditions and relations of production are often conceived of as the ‘material other’ of discourse, and are rarely scrutinised explicitly on the theoretical, analytical, and political level. We argue that such an understanding not only obfuscates the materialist heritage of Discourse Studies. It also contributes to a depoliticised understanding of research, in which the conditions in which discourse is produced are strangely separated from the broader conditions and relations of production in late capitalism. (shrink)

This article seeks to reassess the potential merits and weaknesses of the Subaltern Studies project through the prism of Vivek Chibber’s much-publicised and controversial bookPostcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. By critically examining Chibber’s work, the article aims to better pinpoint exactly what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ with the Subaltern Studies project, while drawing out some productive points of engagement between Marxism and postcolonial theory more generally. In particular, we argue that an understanding of the origins of capitalist modernity (...) remains a relatively unexplored omission within postcolonial thought that problematises their broader project of ‘provincialising Europe’. Against this backdrop, the article explores the affinities between Leon Trotsky’s notion of uneven and combined development and postcolonialism, demonstrating how the former can provide a theoretical solution to the problem of Eurocentrism that the Subaltern Studies project correctly identifies but inadequately conceptualises. (shrink)

In recent decades, there have been major changes in the organisation of social reproduction. As middle-class women have entered the workforce in large numbers, and state provision of childcare and other welfare services has been scaled back under neo-liberalism, there has been an unprecedented outsourcing of household labour to the market. The resulting commodification of social reproduction has not liberated women from the demands of housework but has largely shifted this work away from women in the Global North towards migrant (...) women workers from poor and heavily indebted countries of the Global South. At the same time, there has also been a huge increase in internal migration within Global South countries, as newly wealthy middle classes in the cities are being serviced by poor rural women. Commodified domestic labour relies on the existence of gendered and racialised migrant workers. This article examines the domestic workers’ strike as an effective and urgent mode of political action given the massive and growing concentration of migrant women in domestic work. This requires a reassessment of earlier feminist strategies based on a nuclear family model and current advocacy strategies that, influenced by foundations, have rejected the strike tactic in favour of limited legal strategies. This article draws on my empirical research on domestic workers’ movements in the USA and India in order to highlight emerging strategies of labour movements. (shrink)

With Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri reinvigorated debates in political theory and radical philosophy about the cultivation of revolutionary subjectivity. Their theorization of Empire and multitude has also significantly affected the tenor of critical approaches to educational theory during the past two decades. In this article, we discuss Hardt and Negri’s contribution to what we call the biopolitical turn in educational theory, emphasizing the influence of autonomist Marxism on their work. Even more specifically, we discuss the impact of the (...) autonomist tradition on their formulation of the nature of the relationship between the multitude and Empire: that the multitude is the generative force of the social world, whereas Empire is merely an apparatus of capture. This autonomist approach reveals a set of questions regarding subjectivity, materialism, and social ontology, which we argue are ripe for engagement by educational theorists, and indicate the enduring relevance of Empire as a valuable text for educational theorists interested in matters of biopolitical production, collective opposition, and revolutionary subjectivity. (shrink)

The paper sketches out an account of ambiguous and agonistic love by drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Axel Honneth and Hannah Arendt. To begin with, I reconstruct the ambiguity of love within the conceptual framework of a paradigm of recognition. I argue further that the social relation of love, understood as an intertwine between dependence and independence, entails a power dynamic. Insofar as the dynamic actualises as “power in concert” or “power with”, namely as mutual empowerment, love (...) unfolds as free love. Finally, I show how agonistic love is damaged by turning into violent domination. (shrink)

Makerspaces and hacklabs are believed to encourage a positive attitude towards gaining computer skills. Within these communities for peer production, citizens can apply cutting-edge technologies in DIY projects. In recent decades, mushrooming makerspaces and hacklabs were embraced by the tech industry and governments alike. Feminist makerspaces and hacklabs, however, as they are centred around a queer feminist agenda, have raised eyebrows. In order to foster diversity in tech development, they create safer spaces for self-expression. Here, feminist laymen*, makers, designers, artists (...) and tinkerers experiment with open-source hardware and software. Art and design projects emerging from feminist hacklabs focus on issues of representation and democratic participation in digital media, as well as on ways of reclaiming one’s own body. This article tries to unpack how, after an exhibition on sexual health norms, a feminist hacklab was attacked by local right-wing and conservative politicians. The attack resulted in the defunding of the feminist hacklab. But it also started a transformation process within the collective, as members became aware of critical interferences of diffracting marginalisations. The crisis triggered a discussion on how each member was threatened to very different degrees; for example, there was more at stake for members depending on their legal status in the country. The right-wing and conservative campaign against the feminist hacklab damaged the initiative, but at the same time it pushed the collective to generate increased vehemence and resilience. (shrink)

RESUMEN La filósofa irlandesa Iris Murdoch propone una teoría moral basada en el amor. Esta "ética del amor" se constituye a partir de la atención amorosa y la imaginación. De acuerdo con Murdoch, teorías morales como la kantiana presentan importantes problemas al considerar la moralidad como un asunto de "algoritmos morales". Las éticas dominantes desde la modernidad hasta nuestros días se han centrado en la universalidad, la imparcialidad, los principios morales, etcétera. Murdoch apunta a que la moralidad tiene que ver, (...) más bien, con nuestra capacidad de responder a otros individuos particulares, particularidad que no es reducible a ninguna forma de universalidad o imparcialidad compleja. ABSTRACT The Irish philosopher Iris Murdoch proposes a moral theory based on love. This "ethics of love" is constituted by loving attention and imagination. According to Murdoch, moral theories such as the Kantian one present important problems as they consider morality a matter of "moral algorithms". Dominant ethics from modernity until today have focused on universality, impartiality, moral principles, and so on. Murdoch points out that morality has to do, rather, with our ability to respond to other particular individuals, a particularity that is not reducible to any form of universality or complex impartiality. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the idea of democratic love from the perspective of gender equality. More precisely, I argue that a particular form of gender inequality, namely a gender-specific division of care labour, jeopardizes democratic love. In the first two sections of the article, I introduce Anthony Giddens’ original idea of a ‘democratization of the personal’ and show how Axel Honneth has developed it by relying on the Hegelian notion of social freedom. In the third section, I discuss how (...) the problem of care work affects democratic love relationships and depict the solution to this problem advocated by recognition theory, namely economic recognition. After having reconstructed some possible affinities between socialist-feminist arguments and Honneth’s suggestions, as well as criticisms against them, I outline another recognition-theoretic strategy for recognizing care work. I argue that the recognition paradigm conveys a view of the love relationship as inherently implying a caring recognition of human beings’ dependencies and vulnerabilities. I conclude by hinting at the idea that caring recognition may be extended beyond the social sphere of love, as constituent of social relations in general. (shrink)

This article establishes a dialogue between the philosopher Axel Honneth and the feminist scholars Silvia Federici and Nancy Fraser. The aim is to emphasize the limits of Honneth’s philosophical reflections on the normative dimension of the family developed in Freedom’s Right. First, I present his ideas on how a normative expectation of social freedom permeates familial relations. According to him, after women entered the labour market, a normative notion of symmetrical participation in the family was produced. I aim to defend (...) here that, whether normative or not, this idea of family is not only limited but also false, since it does not consider the dilemmas of social reproduction whose consequences contradict social freedom. Next, I develop Federici’s and Fraser’s analyses of how families have always faced conflicts concerning the requirements of social reproduction and have produced diverse forms of subjugation that go against the very idea of the family as an unquestioned sphere of freedom. It is necessary to analyse how families produce new forms of subjugation to transform familial relations into truly possible ways of being socially free – and this requires making visible some figures who structure the family, such as nannies, friends and grandparents. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the auditory technopolitics of prenatal sound systems, asking what kinds of futures, listeners and temporalities they seek to produce. With patents for prenatal audio apparatus dating back to the late 1980s, there are now a range of devices available to expectant parents. These sound technologies offer multiple benefits: from soothing away stress to increasing the efficiency of ultrasonic scans. However, one common point of emphasis is their capacity to accelerate foetal ‘learning’ and cognitive development. Taking (...) as exemplary the Babypod and BabyPlus devices, I argue that prenatal sound systems make audible a particular figuration of pregnancy and gestational labour that combines divergent notions of responsibility and passivity. Contra the equation of neoliberalism with self-control and individualism, I argue that prenatal sound systems amplify neoliberal capitalism’s elision of personal, maternal and familial responsibility. As reproductive sound technologies, prenatal sound systems facilitate maternal–familial investment in the pre-born as future-child. Consequently, financialised notions of inheritance are substituted for biological inheritance. Drawing attention to the common rhetorical figuration of the sonic as womb-like, furthermore, I argue that prenatal sound systems exemplify what I refer to as uterine audiophilia. By treating the womb as ‘the perfect classroom’, prenatal sound systems imply an intense maternal obligation to invest in and impress upon the future-child, while also envisioning the pregnant person’s body as an occupied, resonant space. Cohering with a fidelity discourse that posits the reproductive medium as passive container and a source of noise that is to be overcome, uterine audiophilia relies upon politically regressive conceptualisations of pregnancy. I thus argue that these devices mark the hitherto under-theorised convergence of auditory culture, technology and reproductive politics. (shrink)

The article critically discusses Pettit’s account of love as an intimate attachment. I will not question his notion that love implies care; my aim is to show how, under certain social structural conditions, the demands of love bring about and/or reproduce oppression. First, I recap and discuss Pettit’s conception of love. Second, I show how the traditional gender order generates asymmetries in the provision of care, thus setting the ground for situations in which the demands of care become oppressive. Third, (...) I critically discuss the ways in which a person can resist the oppression implied in the demands of care. In a fourth step, I consider Pettit’s critique of problematic forms of love. Finally, I conclude by drawing upon the categories of freedom and domination as key concepts for developing a more critical account of love. (shrink)

This article probes the politics of the migrant caregiver/citizen-employer relationship in Palestine/israel as it unfolds within the Jewish-Israeli home. Based on interviews with migrants from the Philippines, Nepal, India and Sri Lanka and their Jewish-Israeli employers, I examine how Israel’s ethno-racially hierarchical citizenship regime and the transnational gendering and racialisation of carework manifest in this relationship. I begin by situating migrant women working as caregivers within the legal and political context of Palestine/israel, delineating how gendered constructions of the Jewish-Israeli woman (...) uphold the borders of the nation and paint non-Jewish migrant women as reproductively threatening. I then analyse two common tropes among citizen-employers in describing migrant caregivers. The first, what I term the ‘kinship trope’, characterizes them as ‘one of the family’, obscuring the ethno-racial basis of the state. I show how this trope contrasts sharply with Zionist settler colonial rhetoric portraying Jewish-Israelis as ‘one big family’. The second trope represents migrant women as individual agents of economic development and Israel as a market-driven, neoliberal society that is equally a state for all its citizens. By depicting Israel as a ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ state that is an exemplar of gender equality, this trope again masks the ethno-racial basis of citizenship, as well as gender disparities. Finally, I argue for a feminist approach to migrant carework that accounts for the ways neoliberal labour formations are mediated by gendered racisms specific to a particular state’s racial nation-building project. (shrink)

Interrogating the oft-stated emotion of ‘guilt’ amongst young female activists, I develop a theoretical account of why young women seem to be more burdened with such negative emotions than young men. Drawing on feminist theorising, I posit that young women’s emotional accounts of activist work highlight the retraditionalisation of gender under neoliberal modernity. I provide evidence of the gender-differentiated demands that heightened forms of reflexivity place on women, young women in particular. I then consider alternative conceptions of politics, grounded in (...) the work of Hannah Arendt, and extending my own earlier work on relational agency (Kennelly, 2009). Drawing on phenomenology to offer an account of political engagement grounded in the lived experiences of activists, I suggest that social movements might be bolstered through a deepened understanding of the role played by webs of relations and world-building practices, without losing sight of the gendered implications of such a turn. (shrink)

This article traces the centrality of capitalism in the work of three decolonial feminists: María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, and Sayek Valencia. Elaborating on the role of capitalism in each of their work separately, I argue that each of these thinkers conceptualizes capitalism in a novel and urgent way, charting new directions for both theory and social movement practice. I thus argue that the decolonial feminist tradition holds crucial philosophical and historical resources for understanding the emergence of capitalism and its endurance.

This article critically assesses the different ways of theoretically connecting feminism, capitalism, and ecology. I take the existing tradition of socialist ecofeminism as my starting point and outline two different ways that the connections among capitalism, the subordination of women, and the destruction of the environment have been made in this literature: materialist ecofeminism and Marxist ecofeminism. I will demonstrate the political and theoretical advantages of these positions in comparison to some of the earlier forms of theorizing the relationship between (...) women and nature, but I will also submit them to philosophical critique. I will show how the Marxist ecofeminist position needs to be both updated and revised in order to account for the different, sometimes contradictory mechanisms for the capitalization of nature that have become prominent today. I will underscore two developments in particular: the dominance of neoliberalism and the development of biotechnology. I will conclude by summing up the theoretical grounds on which a contemporary political alliance between feminist and ecological struggles against capitalism can be built. (shrink)

Self-tracking practices include the use of personal data-gathering apps, wearable devices, and data analysis tools to record patterns from daily activities, as well as the organization, visualization, and analysis of this data. This paper draws on theories of digital labour and feminist political economy to build a framework of digital productive labour that highlights the exploitation of activities external to the formal labour relationship. Self-tracking practices are analysed through the lens of digital productive insofar as they fulfill three roles: they (...) generate the content necessary for sustaining digital networks and producing data that can be captured in commodity form; they aid in the reproduction of the social factory’s labour force; and they cultivate subjectivities amenable to consumption and production in contemporary capitalism. The paper examines the production and commodification of data, highlighting the algorithmic means by which self-trackers are separated from the financial value of their data. This is connected to feminist analyses of unpaid labour, with particular attention to self-tracking’s role as a contemporary form of reproductive labour that replenishes the labour force. Finally, the paper provides an analysis of the themes of self-knowledge, self-discovery, and gamification to understand how these frame self-trackers’ understanding of themselves as labourers, thus reproducing and deepening capitalist subjectivities. The paper concludes by considering self-tracking through the lens of the exploitation of life ‘outside’ the official labour relationship. (shrink)

The nurturing that produces love, care, and solidarity constitutes a discrete social system of affective relations. Affective relations are not social derivatives, subordinate to economic, political, or cultural relations in matters of social justice. Rather, they are productive, materialist human relations that constitute people mentally, emotionally, physically, and socially. As love laboring is highly gendered, and is a form of work that is both inalienable and noncommodifiable, affective relations are therefore sites of political import for social justice. We argue that (...) it is impossible to have gender justice without relational justice in loving and caring. Moreover, if love is to thrive as a valued social practice, public policies need to be directed by norms of love, care, and solidarity rather than norms of capital accumulation. To promote equality in the affective domains of loving and caring, we argue for a four-dimensional rather than a three-dimensional model of social justice as proposed by Nancy Fraser. Such a model would align relational justice, especially in love laboring, with the equalization of resources, respect, and representation. (shrink)

Critical analysis of the biotechnological reproduction of biological life increasingly emphasises the role of value-producing labour in biotechnologically reproductive processes, while also arguing that Marx’s use of the terms ‘labour’ and ‘value’ is inadequate to the critical scrutiny of these processes. Focusing especially on the reformulation of the value-labour relation in recent work in this area by Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, this paper both critiques this reformulation and questions the explanatory efficacy of the category ‘labour’ in this context. Emphasising (...) the contemporary global expansion of capital relative to value-producing labour – specifically, the expansion of fictitious capital and debt on the one hand, and of global surplus populations on the other – it argues that this reformulation misrepresents the mediated capacities of capital as the immediate capacities of labour. This reformulation, moreover, is indicative of broader tendencies in the contemporary theorisation of labour, tendencies exemplified by autonomist Marxism. (shrink)

Recently, growing numbers of interns, apprentices, and volunteers are being recruited to work seasonally on ecologically oriented and organic farms across the global north. To date, there has been very little research examining these emergent forms of non-waged work. In this paper, we analyze the relationships between non-waged agricultural work and the economic circumstances of small- to medium-size farms and the non-economic ambitions of farm operators. We do so through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of farmers’ responses to two surveys (...) we conducted of farmers using non-waged workers in Ontario, Canada. We situate our analysis within debates on the agrarian question, which we contend requires an account for both the economic and non-economic dimensions of new forms of non-waged work on farms. We suggest that many ecologically oriented farm operators are struggling financially and report low gross on-farm revenues and personal incomes. We argue that in addition to relying on off-farm incomes and self-exploitation, many farms are managing to persist in a challenging economic climate through their use of intern, apprentice, and volunteer labor. However, we also suggest that the growth of non-waged work on farms is not simply being driven by economic processes but also a series of non-economic relationships focused on non-institutional farmer training, the pursuit of sustainability, and social movement building. We suggest, the “economic” and “non-economic” dimensions of internships, apprenticeships, and forms of volunteerism sit uneasily alongside of one another, generating questions about the politics, ethics, and sustainability of non-waged work and ecological farming. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains (...) one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the material and rhetorical connection between “parental involvement” and motherhood has the effect of making two important features of parental involvement disappear. Both of these features need to be taken into account to think through the positive and negative effects of parental involvement in public schooling. First, parental involvement is labor. In the following section of this paper, I discuss the work of feminist scholars who have brought this to light. Second, parental involvement remains (...) one of the most significant ways in which citizens participate in the public sphere. While education reform projects centered on parental involvement do show some recognition that what parents/mothers do is in fact work, even as they ignore the gendered dimensions of this work and sunnily demand that parents do ever more of it, these projects resist the recognition that parents’/mothers’ involvement is also political. (shrink)

Digital technologies have made access to and profit from scientific publications hotly contested issues. Debates over open access (OA), however, rarely extend from questions of distribution to questions of how OA is transforming the politics of academic knowledge production. This article argues that the movement towards OA rests on a relatively stable moral episteme that positions different actors involved in the economy of OA (authors, publishers, the general public), and most importantly, knowledge itself. The analysis disentangles the ontological and moral (...) side of these claims, showing how OA changes the meaning of knowledge from a good in the economic, to good in the moral sense. This means OA can be theorized as the moral economy of digital knowledge production. Ultimately, using Boltanski and Thévenot’s work on justification, the article reflects on how this moral economy frames the political subjectivity of actors and institutions involved in academic knowledge production. (shrink)

This article explores how the Slovenian women's lifestyle magazine Naša žena (Our Woman) helped the Yugoslavian socialist project construct and shape the ideal socialist woman, and argues that she became the crucial ally in implementing socialist ideas in the everyday lives of Slovenians. The article shows how texts on food preparation and consumption, as well as those touching on household management and family care, published in Naša žena from 1960 to 1991 played an important part in the ‘civilising’ process that (...) shaped behaviour, directed cultural and social practices, influenced social relations and constructed women's identities during socialism. We show how food-related texts (articles, recipes, columns, advertisements and advertorials) were never far removed from the larger political and economic socialist realities. In fact, they bore witness to changes in living standards and told stories about gender regimes, socialist ideologies and fantasies. These texts belong to a corpus of social transcripts that guide collective understandings of what it means to select, prepare, cook and eat food; what constitutes good cooking and eating; and who is responsible for preparing meals. Despite official socialist feminist rhetoric about freeing women from backward patriarchal arrangements, this article shows that texts offering food-related advice in socialist Yugoslavia contained explicit instructions for the ‘correct’ performance of the social roles of women, legitimising women's roles as worker, mother, wife and housekeeper. Above all, a woman was to be an ‘engineer’ of the private domain whose goals were to feed her family and keep the nation healthy and hence productive, and to modernise her kitchen in support of the technological and economic development of Yugoslavia. (shrink)