Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
GENDER STUDIES AND THE PRECARIOUS LABOUR OF MAKING A DIFFERENCE, Utrecht, Hollanda, 27 - 29 Eylül 2024
This paper focuses on the accounts of three worker subjects from urban Turkey, a domestic worker, a sex worker, and a freelance culture worker, to understand the role of affect in the complex interplay between precarization and commoning. We look at this interplay from a feminist perspective, register the “feminine” qualities of affective labor and analyze how capitalism makes worker subjects vulnerable by instrumentalizing affect. A feminist rethinking of the origins of capitalism demonstrates that women’s everyday paid/unpaid and invisible labor, including providing care, love and affection to their partners, lovers, elderly and children, is “the rock upon which society is built” (Federici 2010). In care-related forms of work, the worker mobilizes their body’s affective capacity to produce exchange value in the capitalist marketplace. We discuss the post-industrial conditions of precarization through affective exploitation, as well as the emergent networks of commoning that challenge these conditions. We observe how our three study participants activate the affirmative potential of affective labor, transform how they perceive themselves and their relationship to others, and become political subjects. We explore the possibilities of living labor that exceeds dead labor, and that capital fails to capture and domesticate. We argue that we can overcome isolation and individualization imposed by neoliberal capitalism if we discover the “common notions” that make us simultaneously vulnerable and powerful. A domestic worker, a sex worker and a freelance cultural worker, who look very different at first sight, have a lot in common -- not just problems, troubles, but also desires and a shared will to create another world. Their commoning practices foster a noncapitalist ethic and constitute an alternative to capitalism’s models of the family, corporation, nation, that is, social institutions that embody the corrupt forms of the common.