Kathleen Lynch, John Baker, Sara Cantillon and Judy Walsh: “Which Equalities Matter? The Place of Affective Equality in Egalitarian Thinking”

“Which Equalities Matter? The Place of Affective Equality in Egalitarian Thinking”
Kathleen Lynch, John Baker, Sara Cantillon and Judy Walsh
Affective Equality: Love, Care and Injustice. 2009. [PDF]

 

There is a deep ambivalence in Western society about caring and loving
generally (hooks, 2000). This ambivalence has found expression in the
academy. In both liberal and radical egalitarian traditions, love and care
have for the most part been treated as private matters, personal affairs, not
subjects of sufficient political importance to be mainstreamed in theory or
empirical investigations, while the subject of solidarity is given limited
research attention. Sociological, economic, legal and political thought has
focused on the public sphere, the outer spaces of life, indifferent to the fact
that none of these can function without the care institutions of society
(Fineman, 2004; Sevenhuijsen, 1998; Tronto, 1993). Within classical economics
and sociology in particular there has been a core assumption that the
prototypical human being is a self-sufficient rational economic man (sic)
(Folbre, 1994; Folbre and Bittman, 2004). There has been little serious account
taken of the reality of dependency for all human beings, both in childhood
and at times of illness and infirmity (Badgett and Folbre, 1999). That fact
generates two very important forms of inequality: inequality in the degree
to which people’s needs for love and care are satisfied, and inequality in
the work that goes into satisfying them. These are the core of what we call
‘affective inequality’.1

Silvia Federici, “Wages Against Housework”

“Wages Against Housework”

Silvia Federici

Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975. [PDF]

They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.

They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.

Every miscarriage is a work accident.

Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions…but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.

More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.

Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.

Many times the difficulties and ambiguities which women express in discussing wages for housework stem from the reduction of wages for housework to a thing, a lump of money, instead of viewing it as a political perspective. The difference between these two standpoints is enormous. To view wages for housework as a thing rather than a perspective is to detach the end result of our struggle from the struggle itself and to miss its significance in demystifying and subverting the role to which women have been confined in capitalist society.

Women’s Struggle Notes, “A Smile for £300”

“A Smile for £300”

Women’s Struggle Notes #2 [1977]

Nursery nurse Christella McCloskey was supposed to smile all the time she was at work. But one day she found she just couldn’t, had a row with her boss, and was sacked.

The smile was back yesterday as she was awarded more than £300 compensation by an industrial tribunal for unfair dismissal.

She was under orders to smile and be happy and cheerful at her work at Warley Green Kindergarten, Smethwick.

One day, when she was in the process of divorcing her husband, the roof of her flat had blown off and she had had a row with workmen she could not manage a smile.

Every Mother is a Working Mother Network, “Caring Work Counts! Mothers Challenge Advocates & the Poverty Lobby”

“Caring Work Counts! Mothers Challenge Advocates & the Poverty Lobby”

Every Mother is a Working Mother Network

Every Mother is a Working Mother Network (EMWM) campaigns to establish that raising children and caring work is work, and that the time mothers spend raising children, and the economic value of their work be included in our right to welfare and other resources.  We campaign for resources to enable a mother to raise her own children full-time or to also work outside the home. We are a national multiracial grassroots network from different backgrounds and situations.

Ellen Reese, “But Who Will Watch the Children? State and Local Campaigns to Improve Child Care Policies”

“But Who Will Watch the Children? State and Local Campaigns to Improve Child Care Policies”

Ellen Reese

Intimate Labors Conference, UCSB, 2007 [PDF]

Note to readers: This paper is a draft of Chapter 5 from a book manuscript, They Say
Cutback, We Say Fight Back! Welfare Reform Activism in an Era of Retrenchment. This
book focuses on struggles over welfare policies after passage of the 1996 federal welfare
reform act in two states–California and Wisconsin– and the two largest cities in those
states. As I explain in an earlier chapter, the information for this chapter comes from
various sources, including participant observation, interviews with activists,
organizational literature, and media coverage of relevant events.

Although the 1996 welfare reform act largely cut back government assistance to
low-income families, it led to expansions in publicly subsidized child care.1 Putting poor
mothers to work meant that someone else would have to take care of their children. In
1997, an estimated 3.5 million additional children were expected to need subsidized child
care due to the implementation of welfare reform, on top of the 7 million already
receiving it.2 To ease the transition from welfare to work, politicians at all levels invested
to expand and improve the subsidized child care system. Congress authorized more
federal funds for child care for low-income families through the Child Care and
Development Fund and TANF.3 Head Start programs were also expanded.4 President
Clinton’s 1997 White House Conference on Child Care also drew attention to the need to
expand and improve the nation’s child care system and to enhance child care workers’
training and earnings. State legislatures and local governments also increased their
investments in child care to help meet the growing demand for these services.5 By 2002,
33 states were spending more in state and federal funds on child care than on cash
assistance for poor families.6 Despite these increases, subsidized child care programs
were insufficient to meet the demand for them, which was growing as maternal
employment increased and real wages stagnated and declined for most Americans.7

Precarias a la Deriva, “A Very Careful Strike – Four hypotheses.”

“A Very Careful Strike – Four hypotheses.”

Precarias a la Deriva

Translated by Franco Ingrassia and Nate Holdren.

Feb. 2005. [PDF]

Translators’ introduction
We are happy to present here a translation of an article by the Precarias a la Deriva, a militant research collective based in Madrid, Spain. We have translated the title of the piece as “A Very Careful Strike.” The title of the piece, “Una huelga de mucho cuidado” is a pun in Spanish, and as such is difficult to render into English. It means, at the same time, something very carefully done, something dangerous (something around which one should take care), as well as referring to the proposal of a strike by those who carry out both paid and unpaid caring labor.

Silvia Federici, “Precarious Labor and Reproductive Work”

“Precarious Labor and Reproductive Work”

Silvia Federici

excerpt from “Precarious labor: A feminist viewpoint” lecture  [2006]

Another criticism I have against the precarious labor theory is that it presents itself as gender neutral. It assumes that the reorganization of production is doing away with the power relations and hierarchies that exist within the working class on the basis of rage, gender and age, and therefore it is not concerned with addressing these power relations; it does not have the theoretical and political tools to think about how to tackle them. There is no discussion in Negri, Virno and Hardt of how the wage has been and continues to be used to organize these divisions and how therefore we must approach the wage struggle so that it does not become an instrument of further divisions, but instead can help us undermined them. To me this is one of the main issues we must address in the movement.

Kathi Weeks, “Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics”

“Life Within and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-Fordist Politics”
Kathi Weeks

ephemera 2007 volume 7(1): 233-249

Feminist theorists have long been interested in immaterial and affective labor, even if
the terms themselves are a more recent invention. Their early explorations of immaterial
laboring practices and relations were part and parcel of the struggle to expand the
category of labor to include more of its gendered forms. Affective labor in particular
has been understood within certain feminist traditions as fundamental both to
contemporary models of exploitation and to the possibility of their subversion.
Contemporary discussions of the concepts of immaterial and affective labor could be
enriched by a better understanding of these lineages. Towards that end, this paper will
focus on two pioneering feminist projects: the second wave socialist feminist effort to
add a critical account of reproductive labor to a Marxist analysis of productive labor and
Arlie Hochschild’s landmark addition of the emotional labors of pink collar service
workers to the critical analyses of white collar immaterial labor exemplified by the
work of C.W. Mills. By focusing on what each of these feminist interventions
contributes, one to Marxist critique and the other to the critical sociology of service
work, one can better understand the specificity of labors in the immaterial mode and the
difficulties posed by their theorization.

Precarias a la deriva, “Adrift through the circuits of feminized precarious work”

“Adrift through the circuits of feminized precarious work”
Precarias a la deriva

Precarias a la Deriva, A la deriva por los circuitos de la precariedad feminina.  Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2004.

Synopsis: we are precarious.  Which is to say some good things (accumulation of diverse knowledges, skills and abilities through work and life experiences in permanent construction), and a lot of bad ones (vulnerability, insecurity, poverty, social exposure).  But our situations are so diverse, so singular, that it is difficult for us to find common denominators from which to depart or clear differences with which to mutually enrich ourselves.  It is complicated for us to express ourselves, to define ourselves from the common ground of precariousness: a precariousness which can do without a clear collective identity in which to simplify and defend itself, but in which some kind of coming together is urgent.  We need to communicate the lack and the excess of our work and life situations in order to escape the neoliberal fragmentation that separates, debilitates and turns us into victims of fear, exploitation, or the egotism of ‘each one for herself.’ Above all, we want to enable the collective construction of other life possibilities through the construction of a shared and creative struggle.

-From the invitation to participate in the first derive, October 2002.

Sandro Mezzadra, “Taking Care: Migration and the Political Economy of Affective Labor”

“Taking Care: Migration and the Political Economy of Affective Labor”

Sandro Mezzadra (Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia – Università di Bologna)
Goldsmiths University of London – Center for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP) March 16th 2005 [PDF]

a) As a starting point for my presentation I would like to take a very particular figure, that is the caretaker (badante). It seems that this neologism, which has been recently introduced in the Italian public discourse and legislation (with the creation of privileged paths of regularization for caretakers themselves), expresses the awareness of the fact that there is a particular sector of the labor market – the care labor market – which is becoming increasingly important in European and Western societies, and that this sector is dominantly, if not exclusively, occupied by migrants. I think that the semantic shift from domestic work to caretaking labor is significant from many points of view. On the one hand, it refers to structural transformations in our societies, such as change in family structure and gender roles, and aging; on the other hand, it can open up a more general discussion on the fact that “care”, in the meaning of an attention which is rooted in a certain kind of sociability and is therefore given for free, is increasingly becoming something rare, unusual. Only something rare, indeed, needs to be purchased on the market and is therefore bound to be commoditized. “Caretakers” are in this sense indeed very specific and peculiar figures within the contemporary composition of living labor, but they share at the same time – on a very abstract level of analysis, of course – a set of characteristics which are increasingly becoming constitutive of labor. On the one hand, this is a point which can be made in regard to other subject positions within labor market, which are themselves increasingly occupied by migrants (and predominantly migrant women) in Europe and in the West: I think of sex workers, but also of the women who sell a very particular kind of “services” – that is, the services of being good wives. On the other hand, if we take a look at the discussion on postfordism, one cannot escape the impression that the affective supplement which seems to be implied by the concept of caretaker is going to become a key feature of labor in general, with the consequence that the boundary itself between labor and life, but also between commodity and not-commodity is being blurred.

Juan Martín Prada, “Economies of affectivity”

“Economies of affectivity”

Juan Martín Prada

Life and biopolitics

It is no longer an exaggeration to claim that we are in the “biological century”, judging by the intense development and the dimension of the achievements attained in recent years in some of the life sciences, such as Genomics and Biotechnology. However, let us not forget that the increasingly more efficient knowledge of the biological processes or genetic determinations of life and its functional mechanisms is only a small part of biopolitical action, whose real capacity for regulation is much more extensive, spanning all of the vital processes that ultimately make up the collective production of subjectivity.  Thus, the capacity to improve or transform bodies or the biological conditions of a life are no longer prevalent among the keys of biopolitics but rather, more than anything else, the production and reproduction of ways of living.

Stijn Vanheule, “Caring and its Impossibilities: A Lacanian Perspective” [excerpt]

“Caring and its Impossibilities: A Lacanian Perspective” [excerpt]
Stijn Vanheule
Organizational and Social Dynamics 2(2): 264-284 (2002)

WHAT ABOUT CAREGIVING PROFESSIONS?
Freud’s and Lacan’s comments regarding neighbour-love and altruism
are directed towards a general attitude rather than professional
caregiving. We suggest the same mechanisms especially apply to
professional caregiving (cf. Ansermet and Sorrentino, 1991; De Soria,
1996).

People engaged in the helping professions are often driven by strong
and sometimes idealised ideas about charity. Many start their jobs with
a rescue-fantasy, wanting to remedy other’s problems. What appeals to
them is the lack they perceive in the person needing help which they
long to suture in one way or another. The ideal of caregiving is thus an
ego ideal for most caregivers. It has a strong narcissistic value (cf.
Grosch and Olsen, 1994) and is rooted in the personal oedipal history

(cf. Freud, 1957; Ferenczi, 1955).

Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor”

“Affective Labor”

Michael Hardt

boundary 2 2:26 [1999]

Focus on the production of affects in our labor and our social practices has often served as a useful ground for anticapitalist projects, in the context of discourses for instance on desire or on use-value.  Affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities.  The productive circuit of affect and value has thus seemed in many respects as an autonomous circuit for the constitutions of subjectivity, alternative to the processes of capitalist valorization.  Theoretical frameworks that have brought together Marx and Freud have conceived of affective labor using terms such as desiring production and more significantly numerous feminist investigations analyzing the potentials within what has been designated traditionally as women’s work have grasped affective labor with terms such as kin work and caring labor.  Each of these analyses reveal the processes whereby our laboring practices produce collective subjectivities, produce sociality, and ultimately produce society itself.