Gender Work

Feminism after Neoliberalism

R. Goodman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137381194
• eBook ISBN: 9781137381200
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recently, labor has acquired a re-emergent public relevance. In response, feminist theory urgently needs to reconsider the relationship between labor and gender. This book builds a theoretically-informed politics about changes in the gendered structure of labor by analyzing how the symbolic power of gender is put in the service of neoliberal practices. Goodman traces the cultural contextualization of 'women's work' from its Marxist roots to its current practices. From the income gap to the gendering of industries, Goodman explores and critiques the rise of corporate power under neoliberalism and the ways and whys that femininity has become one of its principle commodities.

CHAPTER 1

The Gender of Working Time: Revisiting Feminist/Marxist Debates

In the mid-1970s till the mid-1980s, feminist scholars in both the humanities and the social sciences engaged in a vibrant debate about the relationship between Marxist theory and feminism. Following on Juliet Mitchell’s call in the late 1960s for a socialist criticism that took seriously “the subordination of women and the need for their liberation” (1966: 12),¹ feminists tried to grapple with concepts like ideology, exchange, labor, and class struggle, and ask if and when they could be applied to oppressions in women’s social conditions, collected under the umbrella-term of patriarchy, or if women’s forms of subordination were so culturally specific that they needed their own, independent rubric. In about 1985, such inquiry lost its fervor. It was replaced by a much more linguistic and locally focused orientation structured around difference and experience: in other words, in the humanities, thinking about the irreconcilability between the two discourses was buried under a poststructuralist surge: feminism developed a really lively debate around the Symbolic and how meaning was produced in reference to gender without easily being able to connect this discussion to economic thinking or thinking about changes in the nature of work. Meanwhile, in the social sciences, class discourse in feminism was overtaken by a particularizing empiricism, much of the time both history- and theory-avoidant.

At the same time, more women than ever were entering the global workforce while economic polarization was on the increase both nationally and internationally, and women’s impoverishment was on the upswing.² In other words, the more women worked, the poorer laboring people got globally, and the larger the percentage of wealth was accumulated by the wealthy. The end of a heated discussion about feminist and Marxist connections therefore coincided with a rise in an expanded corporate profiting from women’s work in the new neoliberal economy.

While I acknowledge the validity of contentions over Marxist historicism and the difficulty of its applicability to our postindustrialist productive worlds, I believe that Marx offers a basic premise that can be expanded to explain social relations and power structures in the present: that is, that labor produces profit,³ and that women’s labor produces more profit. This premise makes Marxism indispensable for explaining distributions of gender in the current juncture, and therefore for understanding power. For Marx, in capitalist production, unpaid labor time creates profit. Even as women’s work has symbolically captured free time, Marxist analyses have not yet identified capital’s grasp at unpaid labor time with the accumulation of women’s labor time. As the first volume of Capital prosaically notes:

Hence it is self-evident that the labourer is nothing else, his whole life through, than labour-power, that therefore all his disposable time is by nature and law labour time, to be devoted to the self-expansion of capital. Time for education, for intellectual development, for the fulfilling of social functions and for social intercourse, for the free-play of his bodily and mental activity, even for the rest time of Sunday (and that in a country of Sabbatarians!)—moonshine! But in its blind unrestrainable passion, its were-wolf hunger for surplus-labour, capital oversteps not only the moral, but even the merely physical maximum bounds of the working-day. It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. (252)

Many critics have underscored Marx’s emphasis on capital’s need for the freeing-up of time, from Fredric Jameson—who calls capitalism “a process of perpetual breakdown” (2010: 1) and Capital, Volume I “a book about unemployment” (2010: 5)⁴—to Herbert Marcuse—who lists as a condition of freedom the “reduction of working time to a minimum” (44)—to Marx himself who, in “The Fragment on Machines” in the Grundrisse, relates profit to the “creation of a large quantity of disposable time” (Marx’s emphasis; 708). “The whole development of wealth,” Marx specifies, “rests on the creation of disposable time” (Grundrisse, 398).⁵ Whereas industrial capitalism, in its processes of primitive accumulation, destroyed, claimed, and centralized independent spaces of production—for example, agricultural, domestic, etc.—to set labor in motion, postindustrial capitalism seeks to capture independent time, until now identified through autonomous domestic employments, leisure, and consumption whose temporalities are distinctly gendered.

Many feminist critics have justly attributed to Marxism an assumption of masculinity behind the proletariat subject. Heidi Hartmann succinctly reproves, “the categories of Marxism are sex-blind” (1981: 20). Others have indicated that such abstraction is not only neutral or sex-avoidant but distinctly excludes consideration of the feminine in the characterization of labor. As Leopoldina Fortunati, for example, remarks, “The woman, at the formal level, came to be excluded from any direct relation with capital” (28). Additionally, feminists have objected to the tendency, in Marx as well as in Marxism, to marginalize questions of reproduction. Linda Nicholson, for instance, contends that “Marx has eliminated from his theoretical focus all activities basic to human survival which fall outside of the capitalist ‘economy’” (133). Many feminist readings of Marx protest that since Marx did not assume women as working in a separate or private sphere, he was not assuming their existence at all, as though a recognition of women could only occur in the essentialized context of nuclearization, caregiving, reproduction, or domestic seclusion. Roisin McDonough and Rachel Harrison allege, “a wife cannot be regarded as ‘free labour’, because she is bonded to her husband for the purpose of procreation and the reproduction of the bearers of labour power” (31). Christine Delphy agrees that “the oppression of women is held to be a secondary consequence of (and derived from) the class struggle, which is currently defined exclusively as the oppression of the proleteriat by Capital” (1984: 58). Rita Felski concurs: “Most writers agree that the traditional Marxist view of class as a polarized struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is of little use in the contemporary Western context” (34), particularly for feminism and popular culture. Heidi Hartmann and Ann Markusen attribute this split between commodity production and the production of labor power (reproduction) in Marxist analysis to the lack of attention to a specifically “woman-defined” context within Marxist analysis of reproduction: “A truly holistic view of the nature of capitalism must explain both the production of commodities and the production of labor-power. The silence of mainstream Marxist theory on women’s work and the absence of a fully worked-out Marxist theory of the value and sources of labor-power both stem from the failure of Marx and his predecessors to explore this other half of the material process” (1980: 89).⁶ Contingently, and perhaps most injurious to his theory’s applications within the current global context, Marx, particularly in Capital, is predominantly interested in the production of objects, a focus which leaves to the wayside the growing dominance, in certain regions, of commodity markets based in services, affects, and the production of subjects.⁷

Not only do Marx’s descriptions of the processes of production seem, to many critics, to cast women as barely existing phantoms within capitalist productive relations, but also, women seem particularly diminished because of Marx’s emphasis on an overriding historical narrative hinging on class. Andrew Parker, for example, objects to the marginalization of sexuality habitual in Marx and Marxist analysis that feminism can address: “not only . . . has Marx’s typical proletarian long since been identified as male (his industrial labors forming the norm against which domestic work appears as nonlabor), but even the concept of class . . . can itself be viewed as masculinist in its implicit assumption of a familial division of labor” (22). Rejecting a possible connection between Marxism and feminism in favor of a “materialist feminism” more concerned with the discursive construction of gender, Rosemary Hennessy concurs: “With its class bias, its emphasis on economic determinism, and its focus on a history exclusively formulated in terms of capitalist production, classic Marxism in the seventies had barely begun to analyze patriarchal systems of power” (1993: xii). Nearly 20 years later, the same critique holds up, as Kathi Weeks has pointed out: “The problem was that to the extent that class was conceived—as it typically was—as a gender and race-blind category, its ability to register the contours of even narrowly economic hierarchies was limited as well” (17). Though Nancy Hartsock does draw an epistemological or meta-theoretical connection between Marxism and the feminist critique of Enlightenment (1998: 107)⁸—the focus on engagement, the “embedded understanding of subjectivity” (1998: 77), the “importance of processes” (1998: 76), the skeptical account of the “relation of knowledge and power” (1998: 77)—, she still dismisses Marx’s critique of capitalism because: “class [is] understood centrally . . . as the only division that counts”; and, women “are profoundly absent from his account of the extraction of surplus-value” (1998: 75).

On the contrary, I believe that Marx not only includes women in his story of surplus-value, but makes that inclusion into the crux of the process. Rosa Luxemburg, for example, professes that, in Marx, “variable capital is directly attributed to the natural physical increase of a working class already dominated by capital” (341). In other words, in one area of capital growth—variable capital—women’s work is a recognizable factor in the making and increasing of surplus value as well as its capitalization. Luxemburg understands that natural propagation cannot account for women’s full role within the process of extending and realizing the surplus. Rather, Luxemburg remarks, women’s working role in production is essential for realizing the excess product in order for capital to expand and accumulate.⁹ Following Marx, I give here an account of women’s work as accumulating the surplus time of production not totally circumscribed in traditional reproductive functions. With Gayatri Spivak, I argue that “In the current financialization of the globe all critiques of hegemonic humanism”—including feminism—“must digest the rational kernel of Marx’s writings in its own style of work, rather than attempt to settle scores with Marxism” (98).¹⁰

Marx’s abstraction of the individual into a marketable commodity called “labor power” does masculinize the proleteriat subject, stamping the working body as an emptied-out form defined through equivalence, comparability (exchange), and abstraction and contoured around metaphors of mastery, self-possession, power, and rights. The laborer is (ironically, in this particular passage) “untrammeled owner of his capacity for labour, i.e., of his person” and “equal in the eyes of the law” (Capital I, 165), while labor power “exists only as a capacity, or power of the living individual” (Capital I, 167) and, in particular, as a power to transform nature. As well, the proleteriat’s loss of property in “The Communist Manifesto” is lamented as the loss of wife and children (482), that is, as an inability to assert oneself as the center of the bourgeois nuclear family. Additionally, in Marx’s view of history, the class relation transcends the family relation as capital advances. Yet, at the same time, Marx makes it abundantly, even prophetically clear in the first volume of Capital that the gradual feminization of the proletariat is necessary for the expansion of capital. Over and over again, Marx gives examples to show that capital’s drive for profits requires the expropriation of women as time.¹¹ “Legislation was, therefore,” Marx understands, “ . . . to declare any house in which work was done to be a factory” (282), and the “division of labour is thenceforth based, whenever possible, on the employment of women” (434). This theme repeats in “The Communist Manifesto”: “the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women” (479). Marx’s account of labor power emphasizes the integral relationship between labor and captured time, a relationship that requires the appropriation of women’s work as capital advances.

In fact, femininity is intimately involved with the symbolic production of profitable labor time under capitalism. Beyond the paradigm that women store working time by working in a separate sphere of reproductive labor, Marx’s treatment of women’s work uses the separate domestic sphere of reproductive labor as only a sample case of the ways women’s work stores unpaid time, replaced by other historical forms in different historical configurations, like reproduction, credit, hoarding, and circulation. That is, women’s work stores surplus time because of its ties to reproduction, and even though the domestic sphere is its current mode of time storage, different historical moments will see different modes of time storage; no matter what the mode of women’s time storage, time stored now in reproduction creates surplus labor time when it is realized later in circulation and production and is therefore exploitable for profit.

Marx’s insight that rising profits for capitalists coincide with the increasing feminization of the workforce is prescient, even determining for a shrinking, post-Recession, neoliberal economy. The way profit is created through the split between “paid” and “unpaid” labor—or, in Marx’s terms, “necessary” and “surplus” labor time—is still constructed through gender, even as what counts as “unpaid” takes on different forms; for Marx, “unpaid labor” was labor that exceeded what the wage paid for in the productive process, that is, what was necessary for the worker’s subsistence outside the factory, whereas the current economic forces are generating novel mechanisms for exceeding the time of the wage (taking work for free), redefining jobs as surplus to the wage, its organization, its regulatory traditions, its benefits, and protections in order to appropriate such surplus more energetically. For example, according to a 2010 brief from the Center for American Progress that analyzes US Department of Labor statistics, the 2008 financial crisis reduced the number of dual-earner households because more men became unemployed, and the proportion of married women in the workforce thus reached a high. This period, with male unemployment in married couples growing to 3.7 percent and men altogether “lost 70 percent of the jobs” (Boushey, 3), was unprecedented, contrasting sharply with the period of 1979–1997 with its marked lesser degree of polarization. This gendered pattern of job loss was particularly true for couples who were close to retirement, causing a postponement in the age of retirement that was augmented more by cuts in employer pension contributions, and when the time of employment was reduced through the creation of part-timing or temporary positions, and, as Louis Uchitelle reports in The Nation, “helps to explain the rise in mortgage defaults and home foreclosures.” As US gross domestic product (GDP) evinced sustained growth while the unemployment rates remained sharp, prolonging a polarized recovery, some economists like Mark Provost demonstrated that keeping workers’ wages low also keeps inflation low, increasing the gains on assets as well as securities and other speculative investments: “High unemployment constrains labor costs and, thus, also functions as an anchor on inflation and inflation expectations—protecting bondholders’ real return and principal.” More than just encouraging a policy of “total unemployment” in advanced countries, such an outcome also encourages semi-employment and part-time employment. Such a labor-adverse political climate not only weakens labor by weakening labor unions and labor-friendly legislation, by cutting supports for reproducing labor, like education, pensions, and healthcare; it also produces unemployment by employing women in greater numbers.

In other parts of the world, as well, expanding poverty frequently partners up with expansive capitalizing on women’s working time. As Martha Gimenez summarizes the “Facts on Women” of the National Council of Women’s Organization, “the vast majority of the world’s working population is female; women are the poorest of the world’s poor. Seventy percent of the 1.3 billion people who live in absolute poverty are women. Women work 2/3 of the world’s working hours, produce half of the world’s food and yet earn only 10 percent of the world’s income and own less than 1 percent of the world’s property” (2010: 98). Maria Mies has shown how the flexibilization and informalization of labor—in which “women are the immediate targets” (15)—have also become methods for securing women’s labor time in profit regimes for which others benefit. Mies states that the unpaid work of women in the domestic sphere under industrial capitalism was replicated in “non-wage work in the colonies” (33), former colonies, and other sites of capitalist penetration, particularly in “the work of small peasants and women in Third World countries” (33).

An absorption of reproduction into production in neoliberalism jacks up possibilities for the exploitation of unpaid reproductive labor, both inside and outside production. For example, in Ananya Roy’s descriptions of microfinance schemes in the Third World, “Women are seen as particularly important conduits of microfinance loans” (3), first in Bangladesh and then across the developing world, as, for example, “a Mexican microfinance institution . . . makes a healthy profit at $80 million a year by serving about 1 million women at 90 percent interest rates” (27).¹² As Heloise Weber elaborates, “In some cases it is a condition that Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) or Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) do not lend to the poor below a given commercial rate,” and then in a footnote: “In general, interest rates may range from anything between 25–40 percent or higher” (540), according to a World Bank report. Women borrowers, Roy goes on, are considered good investments because the credit agency is able to mobilize the ethical codes of rural life and use intimate rules and local and domestic organization, including informal surveillance more than often gendered, to manage and ensure timely returns.¹³ Microfinance also seizes women’s time by increasingly shifting responsibilities onto women as well as increasingly often lending to more middle-income women, even “successful entrepreneurs . . . with existing job skills and training” (Keating et al., 2010: 164) so that the costs of preparing and educating financed labor is transferred back onto the laboring women, even as such laborers are required to provide their own equipment, often collateralized.

The symbolic placement of women’s reproductive labor time “outside of production”—and therefore outside of production’s regulative rules—even when it is succinctly inside productive processes—has been particularly relevant in Third World contexts, where much of the work of reproducing labor has fallen onto the shoulders of women, whether as immigrants or as cheap corporate and service labor. As Silvia Federici has pointed out, “We can recognize, first, that the expansion of capitalist relations is premised today as well (no less than at the times of the English Enclosures, the conquista of the Americas, and the Atlantic slave-trade) on the separation of the producers from the means of their reproduction” (53). Geographer Melissa Wright chronicles how women’s labor in maquiladoras on the Mexican border has turned into a quick source of profit for multinationals, a production of commodifiable value, because of its quick turnover and unreliability, its temporal “coming and going” (78), where employers can say they expect women of being “loyal” to their family rather than to the company and so only to be employable on a temporary basis. This gives the employers flexibility as well as an excuse for not training the women and then for paying them less as “unskilled workers.” In all these scenarios, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Gender of Working Time: Revisiting Feminist/Marxist Debates
• Chapter 2 Julia Kristeva’s Murders: Neoliberalism and the Labor of the Semiotic
• Chapter 3 Feminist Theory’s Itinerant Legacy: From Language Feminism to Labor Feminism
• Chapter 4 Girls in School: The “Girls’ School” Genre at the New Frontier
• Chapter 5 Gender Work: Feminism after Neoliberalism
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index