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Does digital technology, especially insofar as it is masculinized or seen as gender-neutral (which are generally the same thing: mankind, postman, etc.), resignify the gendered stigma conventionally attached to care work, affective work, and other sorts of feminized work that never quite counts as \u201creal\u201d labor?<\/p>\n
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This question comes out of a conversation I was having with some of my graduate students about Karen Gregory\u2019s recent response<\/a> to Ian Bogost\u2019s Atlantic<\/a> piece on hyperemployment. I don\u2019t have an answer for this question, but I think it\u2019s very important to consider. (Somebody\u2019s probably already written a fabulous piece on it–and if they have, please point me to it!) So, in this post I want to set up the question for further discussion.<\/p>\n The gist of Bogost\u2019s concept of hyperempoyment is this: if we are employed, we all work all the time. Digital technologies have made it easy for a second, third, fourth (and so on ad infinitum) shifts to be built in to every job (middle-class, managerial-style, non-retail or food-service job, presumably). He writes:<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to see email as unwelcome obligations, but too rarely do we take that obligation to its logical if obvious conclusion: those obligations are increasingly akin to another job\u2014or better, many other jobs. For those of us lucky enough to be employed, we\u2019re really hyperemployed\u2014committed to our usual jobs and many other jobs as well. It goes without saying that we\u2019re not being paid for all these jobs, but pay is almost beside the point, because the real cost of hyperemployment is time. We are doing all those things others aren\u2019t doing instead of all the things we are competent at doing. And if we fail to do them, whether through active resistance or simple overwhelm, we alone suffer for it: \u00a0the schedules don\u2019t get made, the paperwork doesn\u2019t get mailed, the proposals don\u2019t get printed, and on and on.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Gregory\u2019s point–which I fully agree with–is that women and minorities have always had a second (and third, and fourth) shift. They\u2019ve always been expected to do the things like make schedules, mail paperwork, and reproduce the conditions for productive labor generally. She writes:<\/p>\n I am wondering if what Bogost is drawing attention to has less to do with \u201cemployment\u201d than with the uneven redistribution and privatization of the labor of social reproduction, an antagonism that feminist theorists have been writing about for more than thirty years…This tacit agreement, however, extends beyond social media and e-mail and is really a form of housework and maintenance for our daily lives.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n For more than thirty years, Marxist feminists have been arguing<\/a> that women\u2019s unpaid labor–housework, reproduction, etc.–is a prerequisite for capitalist wage labor, surplus value extraction, and profit-making. Capital can extract surplus value from waged labor only because the wage laborer is supported by (extracts surplus value from) unwaged labor, mainly in the form of the wife. Gregory\u2019s argument is that what Bogost is pointing to isn\u2019t a new phenomenon so much as a reconfiguration of an ongoing practice: we are all our own wives and moms, so to speak. Indeed, as Bogost\u2019s example suggests, our smartphones wake us up, not our moms, just as emails accomplish a lot of the relational work (scheduling, reminding, checking in, etc.) conventionally performed by women.<\/p>\n Women are trained from a young age to perform this relational, caregiving, extra-shift work. Femininity–the gender ideal and norm–is the technology that helps women perform these tasks with ease and efficiency.<\/strong> Conforming to feminine ideals like cuteness, neatness, cleanliness, attention to (self)presentation, receptivity to others, and so on, trains you in the skills you need to accomplish feminized care\/second+ shift work. Need to persuade people to do unpleasant things (like get out of bed)? It helps to be cute and\/or nurturing! Need to create a clearly legible calendar or schedule that represents a family\u2019s hectic and convoluted schedule? It helps to have neat handwriting, fine motor skills, and design sense (which girls of my generation definitely learned by, say, passing elaborately-decorated and folded notes between classes)! You get the idea.<\/p>\n Now that \u201cmen\u201d<\/strong> (by which I mean, masculinized or non-feminine subjects) are also expected to perform these sorts of tasks as part of their hyperemployment contracts, we rely on technologies other than femininity to assist us in accomplishing this work.<\/strong> Just think about the ways personal computers and smartphones regendered and re-classed secretarial labor. Typing isn\u2019t feminized and classed in the way it once was (my mom\u2019s boss\u2019s wife still won\u2019t type her own emails, because typing is for secretaries, not bourgeois housewives). Typing is universal, at least among the educated middle- and upper-classes. (At this point I want to go reread Sadie Plant\u2019s Zeroes and Ones<\/a>, which is an old-ish but great book about technology, gender, femininity, and women.)<\/p>\n So where does this leave femininity? I wonder if femininity functions as a way of disaggregating valuable \u2018second shift\u2019 work (qua hyperemployment) from valueless but still socially and economically necessary second shift work? There are definitely feminized ways of using these technologies that enable hyperemployment: texting sometimes gets derided as teen girl excess, Pinterest seems to be heavily feminized, etc. How do contemporary ideals of femininity train girls\u2019 bodies to relate to technology in specifically feminized ways, ways that are tied to class, race, ability, etc.? (e.g., \u201cgood girls use technology wisely in their STEM careers, but bad girls use it excessively in their texting\/shopping\/selfies\/etc.\u201d) How might thinking about the feminization of digital technologies\/platforms\/etc. help us think about Gregory\u2019s question: \u201cI am wondering what solidarities can be drawn among bodies, selves, and data (and other nonhuman actors)\u2014solidarities that might really take care of all of us\u201d?<\/p>\n Robin is on twitter as @doctaj.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Does digital technology, especially insofar as it is masculinized or seen as gender-neutral (which are generally the same thing: mankind, postman, etc.), resignify the gendered stigma conventionally attached to care work, affective work, and other sorts of feminized work that never quite counts as \u201creal\u201d labor?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[245,55,26506],"class_list":["post-17662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-feminism","tag-gender","tag-hyperemployment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17662"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17665,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17662\/revisions\/17665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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