Precarity, Parenthood and Play in Jennifer Phang's Advantageous (original) (raw)
Commodifying Care: Migrant Literature and Materialist Feminism
S. Mishra and C. Vandertop eds. Commodities and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press , 2023
Materialist feminists have played a key, if under-recognised role in interrogating Karl Marx’s theorisations of labour, use value and the commodity. Foremost, they underline the link between the reproduction of labour power and the production of commodities, asking the deceptively simple question: ‘[i]f workers’ labor produces all the wealth in society, who then produces the worker?’ Put another way, if (implicitly) male workers make commodities, then what (or which women) historically ‘makes’ the worker and how do we understand their efforts in relation to the end-result of exchange? As a corollary inquiry, theorists also ask: ‘what are the implications of labor power being produced outside the circuit of commodity production, yet being essential to it?’ Social reproduction feminism investigates these conceptual uncertainties, arguing for the importance of what is viewed as women’s work—the daily activities of sustaining and creating life outside of that which capital is willing to pay for—and the resistant energies potentially associated with labour as unique commodity. For, if women’s work is ‘key to the vast wealth of capitalist accumulation’, as Marina Vishmidt and Zöe Sutherland argue, ‘their political agency must equally be key to its revolutionary overthrow’. Taking my cue from the recent critical and popular efflorescence of social reproduction theory—which builds on the insights of earlier thinkers such as Maria Mies, Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, Angela Davis, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty—this chapter looks to the commodified gendered dynamics of our neoliberal conjuncture by focusing on migrant women’s poorly paid domestic work. Since the heyday of materialist feminism, discussions of housework have been altered inexorably by, first, the way in which neoliberalisation has recruited women into the paid workforce while simultaneously promoting divestment from social welfare. Under such conditions, the expectation that women’s labour has ‘infinite flexibility’ leaves females ‘“taking up the slack” of reduced public service provisioning’. Much as these trends are self-evidently gendered, commentators, as David McNally outlines, have sometimes ‘failed to integrate processes of racialization into their analysis’. As relatively more privileged women enter the workforce, for example, domestic labour has progressively been undertaken by migrant and/or working-class women of colour, with care increasingly sold for a price attendant on hierarchies of race. Second, therefore, a ‘key difference between the classical Marxist-feminist analyses of the 1970s’ and a reinvigorated social reproduction feminism of the present moment, is that ‘we are compelled to examine the operations of capital, class, and gender not only within borders but also across them’. Newer theorising, then, is determinedly transnational. This essay draws on two novels about female domestics, published either side of the 2008 financial crash: Thrity Umrigar’s Mumbai-set tragedy, The Space Between Us (2005), told primarily through the eyes of slum-dwelling Bhima; and Christy Lefteri’s topical, Cypriot-based Songbirds (2021), which explores the disappearance of Sri Lankan live-in nanny, Nisha. The former covers the relationship between hard-working, illiterate Bhima and the wealthy Parsi widow, Sera, in whose opulent home she works as a maid. When Sera’s son-in-law, Viraf, rapes Bhima’s orphaned granddaughter, Maya, the women’s bond is tested. Despite paying for Maya’s abortion, Sera terminates Bhima’s employment after Viraf falsely accuses her of theft. Songbirds evokes Nisha’s life as charted through the recollections of her lover, the bankrupted poacher Yiannis, and her solipsistic employer, Petra. Forced, through poverty and widowhood, to leave her own daughter behind, Nisha cares for nine-year old, Aliki. Nisha’s death opens Petra’s eyes to the inequality on her doorstep, while Yiannis mourns the loss of his romantic salvation. The murdered woman’s character, however, remains opaque. Both texts make visible the gendered labour not taken into account sufficiently in economic discussion, as illustrated by Sera’s confident assertion that ‘women don’t live for themselves’. The books demonstrate how women have become ‘the “shock absorbers” of neoliberal economic policies’, while also stressing the racialised commodificatory dynamics at the heart of global care regimes. Strikingly, both novels’ protagonists are discarded once their life (in Nisha’s case) and labours (Bhima is described as ‘old and tired to her very bones’) have been fully exploited. This raises the question of whether the women themselves have become commodities—an inquiry in line with recent understandings of the term ‘commodity’, which have expanded ‘to include all objects of social exchange, monetarized or otherwise. Under this new, more inclusive heading, the commodity includes […] people’. Together, the books demonstrate the violent sexual threat faced by female domestic workers, revealing the intertwined nature of sexual coercion and the control of labour. Each work also shows peripheral women ministering to the affective needs of widowed Petra and abused Sera, respectively—as a metaphor for the blind spots of mainstream feminism. Finally, both authors mobilise claims to authenticity by using an epilogue to tell the stories of the actual women who inspired their writing in the first place, a woman named Menaka in Lefteri’s case and, as professed by the author, Umrigar’s childhood servant: ‘Bhima is real’. With regard to aesthetics, The Space Between Us grants bleak insight into Bhima’s decades-long domesticity in a social realist style, which, as Lakhi Mangharam argues, is in keeping with a ‘long Indian tradition’ animated by ‘the hope that it is possible to represent social reality in a way that enables reflection and change’. As the million-plus selling author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo (2019), Lefteri adopts a naturalistic approach to write about the travails of Mediterranean migrancy in Songbirds. Yet the novel’s overt message that ‘a flawed system can trap people’ has led more than one reviewer to brand it ‘stilted’, ‘preachy’ and ‘didactic’. Moreover, its depiction of Nisha as a doomed songbird risks, what Joe Cleary describes as a sense of ‘middle-class imaginative “slumming”’, by which the oppressed are ‘objects worthy of representation, but scarcely ever subjects to be addressed in their own right’. Affirming this, another reviewer notes how Songbirds is ‘ostensibly about Nisha’ but ‘we never get to meet her'. Rather, she serves as a beautiful angel, in fairly one-note fashion, with Yiannis attesting that ‘[s]he always seemed to know what I was feeling […] she carried my feelings, even the ones I didn’t know I had’. Analogously, the New York Times suggests that Umrigar’s The Space Between Us does not always manage the ‘imaginative leap’ of portraying Bhima, who occasionally proves ‘exaggeratedly ignorant and too good-hearted to be true’. Consequently, and despite their differing formal strategies, both novels reflect the challenges of writing about those with lesser social standing. Nevertheless, Umrigar and Lefteri position themselves differentially amidst the problematics of what Silvia Federici labels ‘a “maids-madams” relation’. The same New York Times reviewer, for example, writes that Umrigar’s ‘portrait of Sera as a woman unable to “transcend her middle-class skin” feels bracingly honest’. This sincerity stems from the crossover between author and character: Umrigar’s portrayal of ‘kindly, well-meaning Sera’ is echoed in her self-description as ‘an earnest, well-meaning teenager’ who ‘loved Bhima for reasons that today make me proud as well as make me cringe’. This self-conscious analysis makes clear the author’s vexed alignment, inviting ‘the middle-class Indian reader to see herself as an agent of exploitation’. By contrast, Lefteri’s accounts of her novel’s genesis hold her distant from such intimate and troubling dynamics. While she claims that her ‘very liberal family’ had a ‘shocking way of talking about’ migrant women, she recalls befriending her family’s maid, Menaka, after requesting her to ‘please stop calling me madam’. This moralistic positioning leads to problems in rendering Petra. On the one hand, the character has to show some obliviousness towards combined and uneven realities in order to reflect the dynamics Lefteri finds difficult in her relatives. Yet, on the other, readers must find Petra engaging enough to help carry the narrative. Resultingly, the novel shifts awkwardly between registers and the sense is given occasionally of an omniscient, high-minded narrator schooling the reader, and Petra, alike. If Umrigar investigates the tensions of madamhood from a self-confessed problem-space within (inviting her middle-class readers to do the same), Lefteri struggles to render the same concerns from without (encouraging the passive hand-wringing of a European liberal readership). One final tension is inherent to both books though: while registering and resisting processes of commodification, they simultaneously commodify the voices of women who otherwise might not have the means to tell, or sell, their own stories. In this way, the novels express the problems of commodification inherent to an uneven literary marketplace.
" New Weapons " for the Precariat in Film and Media Studies
This essay seeks to reproduce the candor and incisiveness of the adjunct memoir in its critique of contingent hiring practices in the academy, without being an adjunct memoir in its own right. It is inspired in part by Gilles Deleuze's observation, in a prescient article concerning the advent of " control societies, " that feelings of fear and hope initiated by a critical political situation must come secondary to the imperative of finding " new weapons. " In such a vein, and despite my own experience of precarious employment as a distinctly noxious emotional cauldron of self-doubt, depression, anxiety and quashed hopes, I speculate here on the stakes of taking up arms against the " new normal " of precarious labour and what the profession in particular can use by way of weapons. I argue in particular that it is time for cinema and media studies (CMS below) to imagine ways of allowing our " precariat " identities to inform our critical discourse, rather than annexing it to a shaming non-visibility. Just as the regimes of gender, race, sexuality and so on entered film studies as vital interventions that speak to who we are as embodied subjects, challenging a more homogenous or universalized model of spectatorship, so the adjunct or NTT instructor has cause to weaponize his or her own status, to use it as a mode of resistance and critique.
Precarity and Motherhood in Philippine Trans Cinema
Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance, 2022
In this short essay, I reflect on representations and themes in trans cinema in the Philippines. I examine the emerging and intersecting themes of precarity and motherhood in two recent films –Rod Singh’s Mamu and a Mother too (2018), and Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2020). I look at how economic and social precarity tends to pervade the lives of trans women, and how transness itself becomes a form of precarity under the legal system’s lack of accommodation to trans rights. I also examine trans motherhood and make the argument that while it destabilizes biology as the root of motherhood, it also reifies traditional tropes of Filipina motherhood that center it on self-sacrifice. Finally, I look at how precarity and motherhood intersect in Philippine Trans Cinema.
Popular Culture Studies Journal, 2021
Abstract: This article presents an analysis of the short film "Zima Blue" (included in Netflix's 2019 anthology "Love, Death + Robots"). This analysis is constructed in three main categories: the psychoanalytic account of an incomplete subjectivity, the role of art in exposing this incompleteness, and the satisfaction from labour. It seeks to revert the question of human freedom from the paradigm of liberating from a higher force, to a paradigm of freely subordinating to a higher force.
ephemera journal, 2021
This article seeks to reconsider the concept of precarity by bringing in the discussion of care. An increased academic interest in the subject of precarity and precarious working conditions in advanced, post-industrial economies is often premised on the false binary of precarity-stability. While stable working and living conditions have historically been a privilege of a minority of autonomous individuals, engaged in productive work, free from direct dependence or dependents, women and marginalised groups are often made more precarious, as their highly exploitable labour assets are not given any, or certainly not an equal value. And while stability at work can destabilize precarious lives of people with care responsibilities and marginalized groups, who need flexibility in order to navigate their lives, subjecting the affective domain to the principles of the market does not offer an effective solution to the inequalities between productive and reproductive labour. The article works on three different levels-the critique of ethnocentrism and androcentrism of the concept of precarity, the introduction of precarious living conditions into the discussion of precarious labour, and the insistence on the necessity to insert solidarity, care and love back into our workplaces as a way to resist capitalist competitiveness and alienation. We also warn against the risk of such care labour being exploited by a next cycle of capitalist appropriation. Reviewing a range of empirical studies, we explore the ways in which care destabilizes the neat boundaries between precarity and stability. We argue that repositioning care as a central activity in all human production and reproduction, both outside paid labour and inside it, allows us to see more clearly potential venues of exploitation and liberation within the predicament of precarity.
In her conceptualization of the human as defined by the capacity for revolt Kristeva unavoidably touches upon issues of robotization, technology, and the virtual. The concepts of animal and machine, however, although they do appear occasionally and in important ways, are never at the focus of her inquiries and are absent in her “New Forms of Revolt.” Yet these two concepts to a large extent define the field of contemporary philosophical debates of the human giving rise to three major theoretical orientations. The human disappears in the animal, in the machine, or in the indistinguishability of the two, confirming what Agamben has described as the inoperativeness of the anthropological machine. The present text turns to Kristeva’s conceptions of motherhood and revolt as introducing a remarkable inflection in this tripartite field.
On the Harnessing of Birth in The Technical Age (2017)
Spaces for the Future: A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology, eds. Joseph Pitt and Ashley Shew, 2017
This article provides a phenomenological interpretation of technological and natural (or drug free) childbirth. By using Heidegger’s ontology of technology I argue that these two types of contemporary childbirth present us with a false dilemma as both reflect the norms Heidegger associates with modernity, namely order, control, and efficiency.