Oakland Tribune, “Protests draw attention to halt in Kidango funding” [9/29/2010]
“Protests draw attention to halt in Kidango funding”
Sean Maher, Oakland Tribune [9/29/2010]
OAKLAND — Parents of about 2,000 Bay Area children found themselves temporarily without child care service Wednesday as a major local provider closed up shop to demand Sacramento lawmakers to finalize and pass the state budget, which is three months late.
Kidango, a nonprofit with child services in 42 locations across the Bay Area, closed all its doors for a day to stage a protest that drew hundreds of parents and their children to a march through Fremont and into to Oakland via BART for a rally at the Elihu M. Harris State Building and City Hall.
California gives the nonprofit about $800,000 a month to aid its operating budget — about $35 per day for each child in its care — but has not sent any money since July 1, when the state’s last budget expired. The 91 days that have passed are a record for the most populous U.S. state.
Kidango organizers said they’re weary of struggling every year to protect state funding for child services, but that this year has been the worst yet since Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed in May to cut child welfare services funding entirely.
“California has been funding child services since World War II, when women had to enter the work force, and never has a governor suggested this funding be eliminated,” Kidango regional director Jennifer Cambra said.
“Of course, it was probably just a bargaining chip to get Democrats negotiating,” Cambra said, “but it was audacious.” Read more…
Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (1999), Article 88
Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (1999)
Article 88: The State guarantees the equality and equitable treatment of men and women in the exercise of the right to work. The state recognizes work at home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth. Housewives are entitled to Social Security in accordance with law.
Claire Fontaine, “Human strike within the field of libidinal economy”
“Human strike within the field of libidinal economy”
Claire Fontaine
Bureau for Open Culture, Descent to Revolution pp. 144-151 [2009]
The possibility of keeping together autonomy and an affective life is a tale that hasn’t been written yet.
Lea Melandri, Una visceralità indicibile, 2007
In 1974 François Lyotard published the surprising book entitled Libidinal Economy where he attacked Marxist and Freudian simplifications and he opened a new perspective on the connection between desires and struggle. What starts to crumble down at that time under the offensive of the two essential weapon-books by Deleuze and Guattari The Anti-OEdipus and A thousand plateaux is the fetishization of consciousness as the organ that will lead the revolution. As the myth of the avant-garde begins to decline, a psychosomatic reorganization arises and its consequences on the relationship between people are brutal and inevitable. Like in an inverted Menenius Agrippa’s speech the head, with all its metaphorical connotations, lost its privilege and the low body could find a new voice full of desire and fear. A new materialism was coming to life inside people’s bodies. At this point the failure of the responsible and pyramidal militant structures becomes blatant: thirst for power, need for leaders and the insufficiency of language to resolve conflicts inside the groups reveal the impossibility of living and fighting in such formations. In ’73 the Gramsci Group wrote in the Proposition for a different way to make politics: “it’s no longer possible to talk to each other from avant-garde to avant-garde with a sectary language of “experts” politicians…and then not being able to concretely talk about our experiences. The consciousness and the explanation of things must become clear through the experience of one’s own condition, one’s own problems and needs and not only through theories that describe mechanisms” (p.508, L’orda d’oro). The language that served the purposes of traditional politics seemed to have lost all its use value in the mouths of these young people; the members of the militant groups felt like they were “spoken,” traversed by a speech that didn’t transform them and couldn’t translate their new uncertain situation. A protagonist of the events describes as it follows his position of leader: “the leader is somebody who is convinced that he has always been revolutionary and communist, and he doesn’t ask himself what the concrete transformation of himself and the others is…The leader is the one that when the assemblies don’t go the way they should either because a silence takes place either because some political positions are expressed which are different from the ones of his own group, he feels that he must intervene in order to fill the verbal space or to affirm his political line against the others.” In this simple and clinical diagnosis we see the groups as spaces where subjective transformation attempts to be funneled into revolutionary efficiency; as a result of this process the positions of the singularities that composed the groups became progressively more and more rigid and the revolutionary space, in order to remain such, imposed the most conservative patterns of behavior within itself.
The term “human strike” was forged to name a revolt against what is reactionary even – and above all – inside the revolt. It defines a type of strike that involves the whole life and not only its professional side, that acknowledges exploitation in all the domains and not only at work. Even the notion of work comes out modified if seen from the ethical prism of human strike: activities that seem to be innocent services and loving obligations to keep the family or the couple together reveal themselves as vulgar exploitation. The human strike is a movement that could potentially contaminate anyone and that attacks the foundations of life in common; its subject isn’t the proletarian or the factory worker but the whatever singularity that everyone is. This movement isn’t there to reveal the exceptionality or the superiority of a group on another but to unmask the whateverness of everybody as the open secret that social classes hide.
One definition of human strike can be found in Tiqqun 2: it’s a strike “with no claims, that deterritorializes the agora and reveals the nonpolitical as the place of the implicit redistribution of responsibilities and unremunerated work.”
Italian feminisms offer a paradigm of this kind of action because they have claimed the abolition of the borders that made politics the territory of men. If the sexual borders of politics weren’t clearly marked in the seventies in Europe, they still persisted in an obscure region of the life in common, like premonitory nightmares that never stop coming true. In 1938 Virginia Woolf wrote in Three Guineas, “Inevitably we look upon societies as conspiracies that sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist, childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately, artificially; where, daubed red and gold, decorated like a savage with feathers he goes through mystic rites and enjoys the dubious pleasures of power and dominion while we, ‘his’ women, are locked in the private house without share in the many societies of which his society is composed.” Against the chalk marks, already obsolete in 1938 but that still keep appearing under our steps even in the twenty-first century, Lia Cigarini and Luisa Muraro specified in 1992 in a text called Politics and political practice: “We don’t want to separate politics from culture, love and work and we can’t find any criterion for doing so. A politics of this kind, a separated one, we wouldn’t like it and we wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
At the core of this necessity of a politics that transforms life and that can be transformed by life, there wasn’t a claim against injustice but the desire of finding the right voice for one’s own body, in order to fight the deep feeling of being spoken by somebody else, that can be called the political ventriloquism.
A quotation by Serena, published in the brochure Sottosopra n°3 in 1976, describes a modest miracle that took place at the women convention in Pinarella, “Something strange happened to me after the first day and a half: underneath the heads that were talking, listening and laughing, there were bodies; if I was speaking (and how serenely, and with no will of self-affirmation I was speaking in front of 200 women!) in my speak, in a way or another there was my body that was finding a strange way to become words.” What an example of miraculous transubstantiation of the human strike.
* 1890 date of birth of the human strike
In her extensive research around the strike in the nineteenth century, Michelle Perrot talks about the birth of a sort of “sentimental strike” in the year 1890. May 4th of that year, in the newspaper from Lille entitled Le Cri du Travailleur (the worker’s scream) we can read that “the strikers didn’t give any reason for their interruption of the work… just that they want to do the same thing than the others.” In this type of movement, young people and women start to play a very important role, Perrot says. In a small village called Vienne militant women encouraged their female comrades, “Let’s not bear this miserable condition any longer. Let’s upraise, let’s claim our rights, let’s fight for a more honourable place. Let’s dare to say to our masters: we are just like you, made out of flesh and bones, we should live happy and free through our work.” In another small village, Besseges, in the same year a young woman of 32, wife of a miner and mother of five, Amandine Vernet, reveals her vocation of natural born leader, “she never made herself noticeable before May 14th when she started to read a written speech in a meeting of 5,000 people in the Robiac woods. The day after she had started to speak, and the following days, made more self-confident by her success, she pronounced violent and moving speeches. She had the talent of making part of her audience cry.”1
In this type of strike, what Perrot calls the emotional strike, the movement is no longer limited to a specific target: what is at stake is a transformation of the subjectivity. This transformation – and that is the interesting point – is at the same time the cause and the consequence of the strike. The subjective, the social and the political changes are tightly entangled so that necessarily this type of uprising concerns subjects whose social identity is poorly codified, the people that Rancière calls the “placeless” or the “part-less.” They are movements where people unite under the slogan “we need to change ourselves” (Foucault), which means that the change of the conditions isn’t the ultimate aim but a means to change one’s subjectivity and one’s relationships.
According to some interpretations, there have been some components of this kind in the movement of ’68. Young people and women rose up then and claimed new rights that weren’t only political in an acquired sense, but that changed the very meaning of the word “political.” The inclusion of sexuality as an officially political territory is actually symptomatic of this transformation. Sexuality isn’t in fact the right term to be used, because it already designates an artificially separated field of reality. We should rather talk about the rehabilitation of the concept of desire, and analyze how new desires enter the political sphere in these specific moments, during the emotional strikes that we call “human strikes.”
The feminisms that do not pursue the integration in a world conceived and shaped by male protagonists are part of these strikes. We can read on this crucial point in a collective book from 1987 entitled Non credere di avere dei diritti (Don’t believe you have any right), “The difference of being a woman hasn’t found its free existence by establishing itself on the given contradictions, present within the social body, but on searching the contradiction that each singular woman was experiencing in herself and that didn’t have any social form before receiving it from the feminine politics. We have invented ourselves, so to speak, the social contradictions that made our freedom necessary.” Where invented doesn’t mean made up but found and translated the facts that reveal their dormant political dimension.
*The plan of consistency of human strike
“They call it love. We call it unpaid labour. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism. Every time that we become pregnant against our own will, it’s an accident at work. Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both work conditions. Homosexuality is just the control of the workers on the production, not the end of the exploitation. No more smiles? No more money. Nothing will be more efficient to destroy the virtue of a smile. Neurosis, suicide, desexualization: professional illnesses of housewives.” Silvia Federici, The right to hatred, 1974
“1) The house where we make the most part of our work (the domestic work), is atomized in thousands of places, but it’s present everywhere, in town, in the countryside, on the mountains, etc.
2) We are controlled and we depend on thousands of little bosses and controllers: they are our husbands, fathers, brothers etc., but we only have one master: the State.
3) Our comrades of work and struggle, that are our neighbors, aren’t physically in touch with us during the work as it happens in the factory: but we can meet in places that we know, where we all go when we can steal some free time during the day. And each one of us isn’t separated from the other by qualifications and professional categories. We all make the same work.
(…) If we went on a strike we would not leave unfinished products or raw materials untransformed etc.: by interrupting our work we wouldn’t paralyze the production but the daily reproduction of the working class. This would hit the heart of the Capitalist system, because it would become an actual strike even for those that normally go on strike without us; but since the moment we stop to guarantee the survival
of those which we are affectively tightened to, we will also have a difficulty in continuing the resistance.” Coordination from Emilia Romagna for the salary to the domestic work, Bologna, 1976
“The worker has the possibility of joining a union, going on strike, the mothers are isolated, locked in their houses, tightened to their children by charitable bonds. Our wildcat strikes manifest themselves as a physical and mental breakdown.” Adrienne Rich, Born of a Woman, 1980
The situation of not being able to draw the line between life and work that beforehand only concerned housewives is now becoming generalized. A strike isn’t possible to envisage for most of us, but the reasons we keep living the way we do and can’t rebel against anyone but ourselves are to be searched in our libidinal metabolism and in the libidinal economy we participate to.
Each struggle has become a struggle against a part of ourselves because we are always partly complicit with the things that oppress us.
The biopower, under which we live, is the power that owns our bodies but allows us the right to speak.
According to what Giorgio Agamben writes in The Coming Community
the colonization of physiology by industry started in the ’20s and it reached its peak when photography allowed a massive circulation of pornography. The anonymous bodies portrayed were absolutely whatever and because of this very reason generically desirable. Images of real human beings had become for the first time in history objects of desire on a massive scale, and therefore objects.
Stuart Ewen explains very well how advertising starts to target heavily women and young people in the fifties, right after the war; women and children were the absolute majority of the bodies portrayed in a promiscuous proximity with goods of consumption. The intimacy between things and human beings creates all sort of symbolic disorders since the very beginning. Since then the consumption shapes the actual life form of human beings – not only what is called life style. In the case of women the confusion and enforced cohabitation with objects within the sphere of desire – male and female desire – is clear for everybody. Advertisements talk to the affects, and tell tales of a human life reconciled with things, where the inexpressiveness and the hostility of object is constantly obliterated by the joy and the beauty that they are supposed to bring to their owners.
Work is never really present and life has no gravity in advertising: objects have no weight, the link between the cause and the effect of gestures is governed by pure fantasy. The dreams engendered by capitalism are the most disquieting of its products, their specific visual language is also the source of the misunderstanding between the inhabitants of the poorly developed countries and the Westerners. These dreams are conceived as devices of subjectivization, scenes from the life of the toxic community of human beings and things. Where the commodity is absent, bodies are tragically different.
If brought to its last consequences this implicit philosophy leads to the complete redundancy of art – and in this sense the message that we all know so well and that we all receive every day in the streets of the cities or from the television screen must be taken seriously. The artwork is no longer the humanized object – this change started to take place in the nineteenth century with the industrialization of life in general. Duchamp himself explains the birth of the readymade in 1955 in an interview with James Johnson Sweeny by declaring that he came to conceive the readymade as a consequence of the dehumanization of the artwork. The task of making the objects expressive, responsive to human feelings, that for thousands of years has been taken in charge by artists, is now performed by capitalism essentially through television. Because what is at stake in the capitalistic vision of the world is a continuous production of a libidinal economy in which behaviors, expressions and gestures contribute to the creation of this new human body.
*The irreversible anthropological transformation in Italy (and elsewhere)
“I think that this generation (…) of the people that were 15 or 20 years old once they have made this [revolutionary] choice between 1971 and 1972, which in the following years becomes a generalized process in the factories and the schools, in the parishes, in the neighbourhoods, they have gone through an anthropological transformation, I can’t find a better definition, an irreversible cultural modification of themselves that you can’t come back from and that’s why these subjects later, after ’79, when everything is over, become crazy, commit suicide, become drug addicts because of the impossibility and the intolerability of being included and tamed by the system.”2
That’s how Nanni Balestrini describes a form of tragic human strike that took place during the eighties, when the movement of ’77 fell under the weight of a disproportioned repression.
The bleed of revolutionary lives from the country makes Italy a nation of disappeared. Without needing a genocide nor a real dictatorship, the strategy of tension and a modest amount of State terrorism achieved this result within a few years.
One should consider that what doesn’t happen isn’t a disgrace or the legitimate source of resentment against the anonymous and submitted population, but as a consequence of what has happened before.
The space of politics where Berlusconi rose without encountering any resistance was a territory where any opposition had been deported since the repression started to function directly on the life forms, since people couldn’t desire in the same way anymore because the libidinal economy they were part of went bankrupt.
One question that still isn’t considered with the adequate attention in the militant context is the one of the struggle-force. The struggleforce, like the love-force, must be protected and regenerated. It’s a resource that doesn’t renovate itself automatically and needs collective conditions for its creation.
Human strike can be read as an extreme attempt to reappropriate the means of production of the struggle-force, the love-force, the life-force.
These means are ends in themselves; they already bring with them a new potentiality that makes the subjects stronger. The political space where this operation is possible isn’t of course the same one that was colonized by the televised biopower. It’s the one that we can foresee in Lia’s words from 1976:
“The return of the repressed threatens all my projects of work, research, politics. Does it threaten them or is it the truly political thing in myself, to which I should give relief and room? (…) The silence failed this part of myself that desired to make politics, but it affirmed something new. There has been a change, I have started to speak out, but during these days I have felt that the affirmative part of myself was occupying all the space again. I convinced myself of the fact that the mute woman is the most fertile objection to our politics. The nonpolitical digs tunnels that we mustn’t fill with earth.”
1 M. Perrot, Les ouvriers en grève, France 1871-1890, Mouton, Paris, La Haye, 1974, p.99-100.
2 N. Balestrini, L’Editore in La Grande Rivolta, Bompiani, Milano, 1999, p.318-319.
Gladys Knight and the Pips, “Mr. Welfare Man”
Lyrics
(Keep away from me, Mr. Welfare)
They just keep on saying I’m a lazy women, don’t love my children and I’m mentally unfit
I must divorce him, cut all my ties with him cuz his ways they make me say
It’s a hard sacrifice (hard sacrifice), not having me a loving man
Society gave us no choice, tried to silence my voice pushing me on the welfare
I’m so tired, I’m so tired of trying to prove my equal rights
Though I’ve made some mistakes for goodness sakes, why should they help mess up my life?
Ooh, So keep away from me, Mr. Welfare. Did you hear me? Keep away from me, Mr. Welfare
Holding me back, using your tact, to make me live against my will, (hard sacrifice)
If that’s how it goes child, I don’t know, I can’t concede my life’s for real
It’s like a private eye for the FBI, just as envious as the Klu Klux Klan
Though I’m of pleasant fate it’s hard to relate, I’ll do the very best I can
Ooh, so keep away from me, ooh ooh Mr. Welfare
No no, did you hear me? (Keep away from me) don’t come near me, stay away, Mr. Welfare
They keep on saying I’m a lazy women, don’t love my children and I’m mentally unfit
I must divorce him, cut all my ties with him cuz his ways they make me say
Oooh, It’s a hard sacrifice. No no no no Lordy. Mr. Welfare, Stay away Mr. Welfare
I’m so tired, I’m so tired of trying to prove my equal rights
Though I’ve made some mistakes for goodness sakes, why should they help mess up my life?
Whoo whoo so keep away from me, Ooh ooh Mr. Welfare. Don’t you hear me? (Keep away from me)
Stay away Mr. Welfare.
They keep on saying I’m a lazy women, don’t love my children and I’m mentally unfit
I must just divorce the man, cut all my ties with him cuz his ways they make me say
Oooooooo, it’s a sacrifice (hard sacrifice), I gotta testify. (hard sacrifice)
Mr. Welfare, Mr. Welfare (hard sacrifice, hard sacrifice) I’m so tired, I’m so tired (hard sacrifice)
I’m so tired, of trying to prove my equal rights
Though I’ve made some mistakes for goodness sakes, why should they help mess up my life?
Whoo whooo whoo keep away from me, Mr. Welfare
Did you hear me? Keep away from me, Oooh Mr. Welfare
They keep saying I’m a lazy women, don’t love my children and I’m mentally unfit
I must divorce him, cut all my ties with him cuz his ways they make me say
It’s a hard sacrifice. I just want to testify. Lordy Lordy Lordy Lordy
Um hmmm, keep away from me. Get on, get on, keep away from me, move on, Mr. Welfare
Keep away from me
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
Solidarity with the Whittier Parents’ Sit-in
Solidarity with the Whittier Parents sit-in – stop the demolition of the field house!!
The Whittier Parents’ Committee is staging a sit-in to fight against the demolition of the Whittier Dual Language School’s field house, in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. The sit-in has been widely reported as the struggle of a community against the blind austerity cuts instituted by a cash-strapped school board. But in fact this struggle brings to light larger and more contentious issues in Chicago and nationally: control over Tax Increment Funding and the top-down reshaping of public education.
The Whittier Parents’ Committee has been organizing for seven years to push Pilsen alderman Daniel Solis to allocate some of the estimated $1 billion in Mayor Daley’s TIF coffers to their school for a school expansion – he finally agreed to give $1.4million of TIF funds for school renovation. Cynically, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has earmarked a part of this money for the destruction of the school’s field house, which has been used for years as a center for community organizing and services. This would directly undermine the ability of the Whittier community to organize and struggle for educational rights. Parents are demanding to be part of the decision-making process.
CPS has been conducting an extreme makeover of public education: privatization, demolitions, school closures and turnarounds, massive firings of seasoned teachers have been part of the large-scale redesign of public education. Public funds are being used to renovate schools that are privatized, while low income neighborhood schools are being starved of the most basic resources. The fight over the survival of this little field house is an important one in the larger struggles around educational rights, community self-determination and control over public land and institutions.
We support the demands of the Whittier Parents’ Committee!
1. Do not demolish the field house – use the same $354,000 allocated to demolish the field house to remodel the building and expand the programs offered, including a school library
2. Work with parents and the local community instead of imposing a top-down vision for the school
Sincerely,
Ellen K. Feder, “The Dangerous Individual(’s) Mother: Biopower, Family, and the Production of Race”
“The Dangerous Individual(’s) Mother: Biopower, Family, and the Production of Race”
Ellen K. Feder
Hypatia vol. 22, no. 2 (Spring 2007)
Even as feminist analyses have contributed in important ways to discussions of how gender is raced and race is gendered, there has been little in the way of comparative analysis of the specific mechanisms that are at work in the production of each. Feder argues that in Michel Foucault’s analytics of power we find tools to understand the reproduction of whiteness as a complex interaction of distinctive expressions of power associated with these categories of difference.
Feminist and critical race theorists alike have long acknowledged the “intersection” of gender and race difference; it is by now a truism that the ways that we become boys and girls, men and women, cannot be disentangled from the ways in which we become white or black men and women, asian or latino/a boys and girls. Feminist theoretical analyses have contributed in important ways to discussions of how gender is raced and race is gendered. and yet, there has been little in the way of comparative analysis of the specific mechanisms that are at work in the production of each, that is, the ways that they come to make sense or are intelligible as categories, together with the ways these categories come to make sense of us—as raced and gendered human beings. Recognizing important differences between the production of gender and race can help feminist and critical race theorists “think together” these categories without conflating, and thus misunderstanding, the specific mechanisms of each. Read more…
“Towards an Insurrectionary Transfeminism”
“Towards an Insurrectionary Transfeminism”
First posted on Bash Back News. [PDF]
a note on gender This essay deals with the discursive and material histories of people I refer to as “trans women,” which I broadly define as anyone not assigned-female at birth who experiences their bodies as female, lives their gender in a way that could be taken as female, and/or identifies as woman/trans-female-spectrum/transfeminine. I rather begrudgingly use this term with a degree of hesitance as it certainly erases the complexities of my gender experience, but I aim to broadly relate to those who have been coercively assigned a gender category other than Woman but who still inherit much of the legacy of such a category.
Towards an Insurrectionary Transfeminism
Trans people remain strangers and outcasts within much of the contemporary discourses of insurrectionary feminism. Essays about “male-bodied” perpetrators of sexual assault and “socialized men and women” seem to leave much to be analyzed about the ways in which trans people have historically related the functioning of gender systems and the development of capitalism as a system. It is in this context that we discursively intervene with that which we might term insurrectionary trans-feminism, an analysis which distinctively analyzes the ways in which trans bodies relate to the legacy of capitalism and the possibilities of living communism and spreading anarchy. In order to imagine the possibilities of subversion, however, we must first recognize the historical relations of capitalism to the formulation of the trans subject.
The relation between capitalism and the trans subject is a contentious one. While many theorists such as Leslie Feinberg have sought to piece together a universal, ahistorical narrative of trans people throughout history across the world, we see such a task as ultimately failing to take into account the precise economic and social conditions which gave rise to each specific instance of gender variance. Gender nonconformity is not a stable or coherent phenomenon which appears in history due to the same conditions, rather it contextually can have a multiplicity of meanings.
While it could certainly be useful to analyze the ways in which capitalism has instituted binary-based gender systems as a means to organize reproductive labor in colonial contexts with different gender systems, for the purposes of this essay we will begin with the notion of the transsexual in context of the early 20th century United States, where the first narratives of transsexuality began to appear. These narratives are intimately tied to the rise of capitalist ventures in experimental medical procedures which gave rise to the the first forms of gender reassignment surgery. By the 1950s, transsexuality had gained public attention in the United States with gender reassignment surgery of Christine Jorgensen. Jorgensen’s narrative, as some narratives just twenty years before her, became a model for the transsexual identity narrative, in which the subject feels that she is in the “wrong body” and that surgery has made her feel whole and relieved the immense feeling of body dysphoria now that she is a real woman. It is in this narrative that we find the experiences of gender dysphoria taking shape to define a concrete subject position of “trans.” By this we do not mean to imply that trans identity is based upon a particular form of body modification or access to medical technology, but rather that these early narratives of trans experience are foundational in the ways in which trans identity has grown, whether in the broadening terms of constituting a political “trans community” on the basis of sharing a feeling of dysphoria or the emergence of genderqueer as a politicized subjectivity which has become delight of postmodernism.
At the same time, as capital has created the ability for trans individuals to modify their bodies in the ways that they see fit, it has also, with biomedical and psychological apparatuses, proliferated the means by which to discipline the trans body. Two of the most notable apparatuses to this effect are the Standards of Care, which enforced rigorous standards of femininity and passibility as a necessary first step towards access to medical technologies of transition, as well as the “charm schools” which accompanied many GID clinics which sought to properly resocialize trans women as “proper ladies” with manners, grace, and all of the feminine wiles of “natural women.” The trans subject’s desires are easily molded into that which can be profitable to capitalism, whether it is countless sessions of laser hair removal sessions, gender reassignment surgeries, or hormone therapy. That is, trans subjectivity is bound to the conditions of capitalism and disciplinary techniques which have given rise to it.
We deploy these words carefully, however, as we also recognize the ways in which “radicals” and “feminists” have deployed the very same as a means of constructing trans women as capitalist-created penetrators of vanity and artificial artifacts of femininity. Yet the constructedness of the trans subject is no more tied to the history of capitalism and domination than the constructedness of woman as an identity, or the constructedness of racialized identities. And as trans people, we feel this in the corporeality forcibly pushed onto us in an attempt to render us intelligible, to use the state of our bodies to comprehend our gender. We feel our bodies outweigh our chosen identities when we interact with others and do not pass. As trans *women*, as we experience the legacy of trans subjectivity within capitalism, we also feel the weight of the corporeality of women in capitalism crush our existences. We experience the gendered division of labor every time we are raped and beaten and condescended to and treated as a hot she-male sex toy. Yet it is in this experience that we might see the possibilities of human strike for the trans woman.
Trans women experience corporeality in a unique way. While capital hopes to continue to use the female body as proletarian machine to reproduce labor-power, trans women’s bodies cannot produce more workers. Perhaps in valorizing this inoperability in reproduction, and willfully extending it to all forms of reproductive labor, we see the potentiality of human strike. Ways of extending this remain to be seen, but in this affront to capitalist-produced nature and matrices of heteronormativity which are crucial to the functioning of capitalism, we see the kinship between the human strike of trans women and the creation of a non-reproductive, purely negative queer force. It seems that the trans woman too has no future, and thus through the building of this negative force might have a stake in wrecking everything and abolishing herself in the process. In any case, we do not have the answers that will render society inoperable, that will end the reproduction of this world. An insurrectionary transfeminist force has yet to be materialized, and it is up to us to make this a reality.
gender strike is human strike,
some bitches.
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. Read more…
Mary M., “So who needs daycare?”
“So who needs daycare?”
Mary M.
From Chicago Women’s Liberation Union newspaper Womankind [Sept 1973]
Working full-time, it is very difficult to provide adequate care for my children, aged 3 and 5, especially for my five-year-old, who is in kindergarten for half a day.
Both my children have been in daycare centers and I am pleased with their experiences. As a teacher in a daycare center and a visitor of several centers around the city during the past months, I know these are some of the happiest places I’ve been, with children and staff sharing and learning from each other.
In this article, I want to discuss my experiences with childcare and look at how society is dealing with the need for it.
The position of women in our society has much to do with the low priority given to childcare needs, for we are told that a woman’s first responsibility is to stay home and raise the children.
However, when a political or economic situation demands it, such as during World War II when society needed women to work, we are told to get a job, and that society will provide childcare.
Today, the economic reality of many women’s lives is that we must work at a paying job as well as raising our children. We are put in a double bind – we are told that our place is in the home taking care of the children, and yet many of us must work. Read more…
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.
Betsy Warrior, “Females and Welfare”
“Females and Welfare”
Betsy Warrior [1969]
There are 35 million poor people in this country. A THIRD OF THE POOR LIVE IN FAMILIES HEADED BY FEMALES. Many of these families are on welfare, and more should be getting some kind of welfare supplement added to their income. Many of us think that in the richest nation in the world there should be no poor people at all, and that the political and economic reasons for their existence must come to an end.
Why were the welfare mothers picked by radical organizers to disrupt the political system, with the economic breakdown on a local level, and the change in the whole political structure that their demands might bring?
Since five million of the poor are aged, it isn’t likely that these older people would start an active fight against the system that kept them in poverty. Old people are more conservative and lack the energy and determination for a prolonged fight. But other families, a lot of them headed by males — why don’t they fight the system that made them poor? They could fight for an adequate income.
What are the special qualities welfare mothers possess, to make them the ones chosen to fight the establishment? The basic reason is mothers will fight for their children, to supply their needs, and they will struggle for as long as it takes for their children to grow up. They possess both will and sustained determination to demand long and loud that the political structure allow their children enough to live on decently, and in doing so change the political structure. Read more…
Pat Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework”
“The Politics of Housework”
by Pat Mainardi [1970]
(Editors Note: This article was originally published by Redstockings in 1970. Redstockings was an early women’s liberation group centered in New York and was responsible for a number of influential writings.)
Though women do not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It is the same in all other cases of servitude; at least in the commencement of the emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at first complain of the power of the lords, but only of their tyranny. -John Stuart Mill On the Subjection of Women
Liberated women-very different from Women’s Liberation! The first signals all kinds of goodies, to warm the hearts (not to mention other parts) of the most radical men. The other signals-HOUSEWORK. The first brings sex without marriage, sex before marriage, cozy housekeeping arrangements (“I’m living with this chick”) and the self-content of knowing that you’re not the kind of man who wants a doormat instead of a woman. That will come later. After all, who wants that old commodity anymore, the Standard American Housewife, all husband, home and kids? The New Commodity; the Liberated Woman, has sex a lot and has a Career, preferably something that can be fitted in with the household chores-like dancing, pottery, or painting.
On the other hand is Women’s Liberation-and housework. What? You say this is all trivial? Wonderful! That’s what I thought. It seemed perfectly reasonable. We both had careers, both had to work a couple of days a week to earn enough to live on, so why shouldn’t we share the housework? So I suggested it to my mate and he agreed-most men are too hip to turn you down flat. You’re right, he said. It’s only fair. Then an interesting thing happened. I can only explain it by stating that we women have been brainwashed more than even we can imagine, Probably too many years of seeing television women in ecstasy over their shiny waxed floors or breaking down over their dirty shirt collars. Men have no such conditioning. They recognize the essential fact of housework right from the very beginning. Which is that it stinks. Read more…
Sanford F. Schram, “Where the Welfare Queen Resides: The Subtext of Personal Responsibility”
“Where the Welfare Queen Resides: The Subtext of Personal Responsibility”
Sanford F. Schram
Chapter 2, After Welfare: The Culture of Postindustrial Social Policy, 2000. [PDF]
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) requires welfare recipients to take paid employment in order to receive aid and imposes a five-year lifetime limit on eligibility. After this time recipients are expected to be supporting themselves. Welfare reform is predicated on the assumption that staying home and caring for one’s children is not work, and that the primary, and perhaps only, way an individual can demonstrate “personal responsibility” is by taking paid employment. In what follows, I argue that not only is this emphasis on “personal responsibility” prejudiced against mothers who stay at home with their children, but that it operates to allow dominant gender, race, and class biases to infiltrate allegedly neutral welfare policy and ensure the continued subordination of poor families. In other words, the contemporary welfare policy discourse of “personal responsibility” might sound fair in the abstract; however, in late-twentieth-century America, it has become a way to blame the poor for their poverty without ever having to say so. “Personal responsibility” allows the cultural biases of welfare reform to be “hidden in plain sight.”1
Is this controversial? For some, the 1996 reform law obviously intensifies the unfairness of welfare toward recipients by allowing the broader social biases of gender, race, and class relations to structure the system of welfare provision.2 Making low-income single mothers work for poverty wages while having to care for their children on their own amounts to punishing them for being at the bottom of the gender-race-class system, sometimes euphemistically referred to as the socioeconomic order. The existing political economy is rationalized according to a family-wage logic that incorrectly assumes that families tend to have two parents, one of whom, “the breadwinner,” is able to earn enough to support the family while the other, “the homemaker,” provides the necessary nurturance at home.3 The family-wage system is biased in favor of middle- and upper-class, male-headed, white families that tend to be able to conform to this model. While most families, white ones included, have found it difficult to succeed in a political economy structured according to this logic, they find it even more difficult in the changing postindustrial economy. Poor single mothers of color are the least likely to be able to participate effectively in such a biased system. Welfare compensates families who face extreme financial hardship, but it has historically been constrained to provide aid in limited amounts and under strict conditions so as not to conflict with the family-wage logic. The 1996 law has adjusted welfare to reinforce this, thereby reinscribing the gender, race, and class biases of the dominant culture. Read more…
Jamrat Mason, Hackney Pride speech
Hackney Pride speech
Jamrat Mason [Sept. 2010]
I’m a lucky tranny. First of all because I’m alive. And secondly because I have a family who loves me. That shouldn’t be lucky, but at the moment, it is. My own experience is quite unique so I thought I’d give you a quick history: At 3 years old my first sentence was “I’m a boy”, at 7 years old when I was still convinced that this was true, my parents took me to a psychologist. The psychologist said I probably have “Gender Dysphoria”. My parents talked to my school and allowed me to cut my hair and wear a boy’s uniform. When I was 8 I was referred on to a specialist in London (on the NHS) who I saw until I was 18. When I was 12 I legally changed my name which my granny paid for. So I’ve been living as male since I was about 7 or 8. I went through a full female puberty and eventually got testosterone when I was 21. I had surgery when I was 22. I’m 24 now so I’ve looked like this for about 2 years.
It’s not my intention to simple ask for a complacent acceptance of trans people- for people to just stop insulting us and beating us up… I want to talk about transphobia as an issue that affects all of us- and that we can all play a part in fighting. We must, as a society, be better at gender.
In the womb we all start off as female. People who come out as little boys are changed during the pregnancy when testosterone is introduced. The clitoris grows and becomes penis, and the labia becomes a scrotum. Woman are so-called because they’re meant to be like men, but with wombs- womb-man. But in reality, men are women with big clitorises. Bigclits. Most people come out with either a vagina or a penis, but some people are somewhere inbetween- these people are ‘intersex’. As soon as we’re born boys and girls are treated drasticallly differently- boys are given lego, girls are given dolls (and then people wonder about the lack of female engineers); girls are encouraged to care and talk about their feelings, whilst boys are told to be tough. Every boy and girl, to some extent, has to grapple with the difference between who they are, and what a Real Man is. What a Real Woman is. Every body suffers from the invention of the Man and the Woman. And I consider myself an extreme casualty of this- I don’t really consider myself a Man- but I know, violently, that I’m not a woman. I think that transpeople generally are an extreme casualty of this problem.
Society is organised into men and women and I don’t fit into either. If I were to have to go to prison, I could either be a man in an all female prison, or a man with a vagina in an all male-prison where privacy is not exactly a priority. If I were to be arrested and strip-searched I’ve got a choice between a male officer or a female police officer. But I’m not a man, that is not my sex, I am a transexual. There is now a Gender Recognition Certificate so that I can be recognised as either a Man or a Woman by the state. But I am not a Man or a Woman, I am a transexual. I could be treated as a man, go to a male prison, be searched by a male officer, get married to a woman. But I don’t want to get married, I don’t want to live in a society where people are sent to prison and strip searched by police. I don’t believe in leading a fight where we’re asking to government to deal with us more efficiently, to oppress us better. I don’t want to be integrated better a rotten system, a want something different altogether. I want to take part in creating a better world.
Prejudice against transmen, that’s me, is based on the sense that we’re trying to muscle in on the privilege of being male that we don’t deserve, we are inadequate, we don’t have penises, and if we do, they’re either weird and tiny or crap. We’re inadequate men, with big bums and crap willies.
Prejudice against transwomen is based on the sense that they’re degrading themselves, they’re funny, a joke, why would you want to be a woman? They’re trying to take a step down in society.
So transphobia is rooted in sexism. Some people believe that transwomen can’t possibly know what it’s like to be a woman because they haven’t experienced sexism. But the transphobia that transwoman get IS sexism, multiplied by a hundred!
Some people say that trans men are just trying to escape sexism by turning into men. Let me tell you, when you’re a transexual, you do not escape sexism, you are pushed right into an enormous swamp of sexism. When you experience both sides and more, you begin to see the sexism, you notice it when other people don’t, when you play with gender you’re witnessing the flow of power.
Sexism, and more specifically this form of sexism which is a reaction to people’s gender deviance- not being a Proper Man, or a Proper Woman, is something that seems to be ignored. It plays a huge part in homophobia- A gay boy, who is very masculine and handy with his fists is not likely to be bullied at school. School kids don’t usually see what their school mates find sexually attractive, they see how they behave. Effeminate boys are bullied for being effeminate- and the words the kids use are gay, and batty boy, but they’re being bullied because they’re not acting like Real Men, this is sexism, but we call it homophobia. And when you call it homophobia, what organisations are there helping the effeminate straight boy? He’s being told that it’s okay to be gay, but no one’s saying that it’s okay to be a bit girly. This is the same bullying that transexual people experience in the extreme, but it is in no way reserved for us.
The experience of transgendered people is at the lethally sharp end of the wedge- and it is a lethally sharp edge, the Transgender Day of Remembrance website shows that in 2009 130 transgendered people were reported murdered- but this is a universal problem, rooted in sexism, it affects all os us and we can all take a part in fighting it.
The invention of the Real Man and the Real Woman is enshrined in the economy. For as long as someone has to work all week to get a wage, to survive, and for as long as we have babies that have to be looked after, someone else has to work in the home, and bring up babies for free. At the moment, most of the time, the man works full time and the woman works for free in the home. It’s the unpaid labour that keeps the whole system running. Take it away, and the whole thing collapses. But that won’t change by messing around with gender, or by swapping it around and turning the patriarchy into a matriarchy, or mixing it up, or by taking turns… or by paying another woman minimum wage to do the job instead. For as long as this system keeps going, someone has to work in the home for free. And this is one of the most fundamental injustices the forms the foundation of our economy. As much as transgendered people might highlight that these are not two unchanging natural roles, a liberal plea for tolerance is not the force that will bring it down. Read more…
Associated Press, “California students get tracking devices” (Aug. 18, 2010)
“California students get tracking devices”
The Associated Press [08/18/2010]
RICHMOND, Calif.—California officials are outfitting preschoolers in Contra Costa County with tracking devices they say will save staff time and money.
The system was introduced Tuesday. When at the school, students will wear a jersey that has a small radio frequency tag. The tag will send signals to sensors that help track children’s whereabouts, attendance and even whether they’ve eaten or not.
School officials say it will free up teachers and administrators who previously had to note on paper files when a child was absent or had eaten.
Sung Kim of the county’s employment and human services department said the system could save thousands of hours of staff time and pay for itself within a year.
It cost $50,000 and was paid by a federal grant.
Silvia Federici, “Putting feminism back on its feet”
“Putting feminism back on its feet”
Silvia Federici
Social Text, No. 9/10, The 60’s without Apology (Spring – Summer, 1984), pp. 338-346
Conducted in New York City, summer 1983, by S. Sayres. Questions have been deleted.
Almost fourteen years have passed since I became involved with the women’s
movement. At first it was with a certain distance. I would go to some
meetings but with reservations, since to a “politico” like I was it seemed
difficult to reconcile feminism with a “class perspective.” Or this at least
was the rationale. More likely I was unwilling to accept my identity as a
woman after having for years pinned all my hopes on my ability to pass for
a man. Two experiences were crucial in my becoming a committed feminist.
First my living with Ruth Geller, who has since become a writer and recorded
in her Seed of a Woman the beginning of the movement, and who
in the typical feminist fashion of the time would continually scorn my enslavement
to men. And then my reading Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s The Power
of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1970), a pamphlet that
was to become one of the most controversial feminist documents. At the
last page I knew that I had found my home, my tribe and my own self, as a
woman and a feminist. From that also stemmed my involvement in the
Wages for Housework campaign that women like Dalla Costa and Selma
James were organizing in Italy and Britain, and my decision to start, in 1972,
Wages for Housework groups also in this country. Read more…
Silvia Federici, “The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s”
“The Restructuring of Social Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s”
Silvia Federici
the commoner N. 11 Spring 2006
The following is the text of a paper that Silvia Federici wrote in 1980 for a
Conference convened by the Centro Studi Americani in Roma on “The Economic
Policies of Female Labor in Italy and the United States.” The Conference was
held in Rome on December 9-11, 1980 and was co-sponsored by the German
Marshall Fund of the United States.
New York, (1980)
“If women wish the position of the wife to have the honor which they attach to
it, they will not talk about the value of their services and about stated incomes,
but they will live with their husbands in the spirit of the vow of the English
marriage service, taking them ‘for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in
sickness and in health, to love, honor, obey.’ This is to be a wife.” – New York
Times, August 10th, 1876: “Wives’ Wages”
“The most valuable of all social capital is that invested in human beings and of
that capital the most precious part is the result of the care and influence of the
mother, so long as she retains her tender and unselfish instincts.” – Alfred
Marshall, Principles of Economics (1890).
While it is generally recognized that the dramatic expansion of the female
labor force is possibly the most important social phenomenon of the 1970s,
uncertainty still prevails among economists as to its origins. Technological
advancement in the home, the reduction of family size and the growth of the service
sector are offered as likely causes of this trend. Yet, it is also argued that these factors
may be an effect of women’s entering the labor force and that looking for a cause
would lead us in a vicious circle, a “what comes first, the chicken or the egg”
problem. As this paper claims, the uncertainty among economists stems from their
failure to recognize that the dramatic increase of the female labor force in the 1970s
reflects women’s refusal to function as unwaged workers in the home, catering to the
reproduction of the national work force. In fact, what goes under the name of
“homemaking” is (to use Gary Becker’s expression) a “productive consumption”
process,1 producing and reproducing “human capital,” or in the words of Alfred
Marshall, the laborer’s “general ability” to work.2 Social planners have often
recognized the importance of this work for the economy. Yet, as Becker points out,
the productive consumption that takes place in the home has had a “bandit like
existence in economic thought.”3 For the fact that this work is not waged, in a
society where work and wages are synonyms, makes it invisible as work, to the point
that the services it provides are not included in the Gross National Product (GNP)
and the providers are absent from the calculations of the national labor force. Read more…
Selma James/Johnson-Forest Tendency, “On the Woman Question: An Orientation”
“On the Woman Question: An Orientation”
Selma James [Sept. 3, 1951]
Selma James delivered this report on behalf of the Johnson-Forest Tendency. Selma James was an important figure in the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a co-author of the pamphlet, A Woman’s Place, during the Correspondence period. In the 1955 split with Dunayevskaya, she sided with C.L.R. James and married him after he divorced Constance Webb. She eventually separated from James and became a leader in the radical women’s movement in Britain in the 1970s. She was also closely associated with the Italian feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa in the wages for housework campaign. She is involved now with the Global Women’s Strike organization (www.globalwomenstrike.net).
A new stage has been reached. We are finished with endless discussions on male chauvinism. We have no more time for individual attacks against individual men who are backward or against individual women who do not want to be “emancipated.” These people will reorient themselves and will be drawn into their own struggles.
Now for the first time we know where we are going. We did not develop accidentally. The ideas explicit in this document are the concrete manifestations of the movement of capitalism and the reaction of the masses of women today. It is this reaction that we shall attempt to concretize in this document.
Bebel and the other historians on the woman question have analysed women in other ages, other struggles, other cultures. But it is we who must express women in 1951, what they feel about their lives, what they want and how they plan to get it.
We counterpose this to any external plan of the bourgeoisie, put forth by social workers, magazine writers, psychoanalysts, and any section of women who place themselves not within the struggle of women but above it, and therefore in opposition to it. Read more…
Child Development Group of Mississippi, “A Letter to you from Tom Levin”
“A Letter to you from Tom Levin”
Child Development Group of Mississippi
Newsletter #3 [1965]
A letter to all those who have made CDGM possible –
Dear friends,
This summer in Mississippi we have built upon the struggles of passed years. We built CDGM upon the ahes of churches where poor people spoke out for equality. We built CDGM upon the bodies of Negro and white workers for the poor who were killed because they would not stay quietly at home to live in peace with injustice. We built CDGM upon the hunger and humiliation of men and women who were not allowed to work at a decent job before they would not give up being free. We built upon hundreds of years of the suffering and courage of mothers and fathers throughout the state of Mississippi who wanted something human and decent for their children and themselves. If we are proud of what we have done we must remember that we could not have schools run by the poor people, schools with black and white working together, if a place in history had not been won for us by brave men and women before this summer – men and women who said loudly and clearly “All Men Must Be Free.” We have a large debt to these brave people of the “Movement.” We can only pay it by never being satisfied until all men in Mississippi have political, social, and economic freedom. Read more…
caring labor: an archive 