{"id":18710,"date":"2014-06-06T05:00:34","date_gmt":"2014-06-06T09:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=18710"},"modified":"2014-06-05T17:49:48","modified_gmt":"2014-06-05T21:49:48","slug":"the-financialized-girl-more-thoughts-on-hyperemployment-human-capital-and-lean-in-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/06\/06\/the-financialized-girl-more-thoughts-on-hyperemployment-human-capital-and-lean-in-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"The Financialized Girl: more thoughts on hyperemployment, human capital, and Lean In culture"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is from the Girl Scouts website.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is cross-posted from Its Her Factory<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In an earlier post<\/a>, I asked what happens to femininity when the kind of second-shift care work traditionally assigned to women is increasingly a feature of all<\/i> work, especially conventionally masculinized jobs. This post picks up where that one left off. Here, I\u2019ll use Michelle Murphy\u2019s concept of \u201cthe financialization of girls<\/a>\u201d to help me argue that \u201cfemininity\u201d is something that distinguishes unpaid care labor (which is feminized, or girl-ized) from the kinds of profitable self-investment in one\u2019s human and social capital required, nowadays, for success.<\/p>\n

Analyzing NGO promotional videos, reports, mission statements, and the like, Murphy shows that the figure of \u201cThe Girl\u201d–the so-called \u201cThird-World\u201d or otherwise poor, victimized, \u201cthoroughly heterosexualized\u201d young woman–has become the primary focus of international development discourse and practice. This \u201cabstract and universalized girl-child\u201d is one huge stereotype: it\u2019s how the global elite thinks poor girls in non-Western liberal democratic societies are. This girl is always undereducated and undervalued.<\/p>\n

Because of her lack of formal education and her situation in a \u201ctraditional\u201d society (a society that seems, to the global elite, more misogynist and regressively patriarchal than Western liberal democratic societies), The Girl is seen as a risk, and in her personal risk hangs the balance of the entire planet\u2019s future. If she has an \u201cunproductive life\u201d–one with many children and little economic contribution–then the world\u2019s environment and economy will only suffer. If she has a \u201cproductive life,\u201d however, we all win. Basically, The Girl is human capital ripe for flipping–if we invest a little in her, we\u2019ll get back huge returns. [1]<\/p>\n

The Girl is human capital. This is absolutely fundamental to Murphy\u2019s analysis. It\u2019s what distinguishes this type of patriarchy from more traditional types which treat women not as capital, but as private property–not something to invest in, but something to exchange (I\u2019m thinking about Gayle Rubin\u2019s famous piece on \u201cThe Exchange of Women\u201d and Luce Irigaray\u2019s reading of Marx in \u201cWomen On the Market,\u201d for example). When women are treated as private property, patriarchy focuses on regulating women\u2019s reproductive capacity. This is because reproduction and the family form are about the transmission of private property (from father to \u201clegitimate\u201d children). But, as Murphy explains,<\/p>\n

A focus on human capital moves the point of intervention and adjustment from fertility itself to education; from distributing contraception to \u201cwomen\u201d to producing the conditions for higher rates of return on \u201cgirls,\u201d a change that has come to dominate World Bank and UN-affiliated programs in the last decade. Since the 1990s, the figure of the racialized, \u201cthird-world girl\u201d\u2014typically represented as South Asian or African, often Muslim\u2014has become the iconic vessel of human capital.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Girl is the effect of viewing gender through neoliberal lenses that turn everything into a financialized <\/i>market. Or, in other words, financial capitalism has altered gender roles, on the one hand, and the techniques by which one assumes or is assigned a role, and The Girl is one prominent example of a financialized gender role.<\/p>\n

In the 70s, feminist theory (most famously the Rubin and Irigaray pieces I mentioned above) explained how commodity capitalism structured patriarchal gender roles and relations: \u201cmen\u201d were the people and institutions in the position to exchange and profit from exchanges of \u201cwomen\u201d; \u201cwomen\u201d were the people and institutions in the position of being exchanged, whose circulation generated profits for others. I talk a bit about that model of gender as exchange here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But in financial capitalism, nothing gets exchanged–investment directly compounds the value of money, seemingly growing money right out of, well, money. In this model, girls are what are financialized–they\u2019re low-value, relatively low-risk \u2018stock\u2019 that \u201cmen\u201d invest in. In financialized capitalism, \u201cmen\u201d are the people and institutions in the position to invest in and profit from The Girl; \u201cwomen\u201d are the people and institutions who are or have been invested by others, and who do not get the profits\/surplus value from their own human capital. Having the surplus (human, social) capital to invest, for example, in service labor is the effect of being a \u201cman\u201d–that is, of occupying the position of structural dominance in a patriarchal system. Lacking the surplus capital to invest in oneself, let alone in others, is the effect of being a woman or a Girl–that is, of occupying the position of structural subjection in a patriarchal system.<\/p>\n

Investing in Girls generates surplus human capital for the investor<\/i>, not for the Girl whose capital is vested. Investing in Girl-capital is fundamentally different than feminized care\/affective labor. Care and affective labor are often investments in others–for example, I\u2019m investing my time and my talents in my students when I mentor them on the weekend over Facebook Messenger as they scramble to finish an application before a deadline. However, I don\u2019t get the surplus value back from that investment–my students do. In this example, I\u2019m investing in others, in others human capital, but in a way that doesn\u2019t return profits to me<\/i>. You might say my investment of human capital is alienated from me. That\u2019s feminized care labor. Investing in Girls, on the other hand, generates human capital value for me–for example, doing white saviorist-y volunteer work boosts my human capital, and my own self-esteem (which is a kind of human capital). In both cases, the feminized position–that of the care worker, the Girl-as-finance-instrument–is the one in which investments reap profits for others.<\/p>\n

When I perform the traditionally feminized work of hyperemployment, it doesn\u2019t feminize me, it doesn\u2019t turn me into a Girl. I am investing in myself, in my future success. I am my own capital. The Girl is feminized because she is capital for others–others invest in and profit from her. So, the financialized Girl is a necessary complement to hyperemployent and the generalization of care\/affective labor: it\u2019s how we mark gender roles now that everybody\u2019s supposed to do the things conventionally regarded as \u201cwomen\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n

This idea of the financialized Girl has a few more important implications that, though don\u2019t have time to develop here, I would like to pursue in the future.<\/p>\n

1. \u00a0Earlier this week on Facebook, Erin Tarver (@drtarver) and I were talking about the trend of using \u201cFootball 101\u201d to market college football fandom to women. Erin brilliantly observed that these type of events include women in football fandom as inherent, eternal novices–as needing a \u201c101\u201d course because whatever knowledge they may have of football isn\u2019t the \u201cright\u201d knowledge. Including women via remedial education both expands the market for football and maintains the normative masculinity of football fandom, football fan discourse, and so on. So, it\u2019s a way to include women while maintaining male\/masculine dominance. This moves strikes me as similar to the financialized Girl, b\/c Girls are included in capitalism as sites of remediation: girls need to be educated, improved, \u2018flipped,\u2019 etc. This Football 101 example makes me think that middle-class, college-educated, Western–that is, more privileged–women are still financialized, but in more subtle ways. Isn\u2019t this what \u201cLean In\u201d culture is?<\/p>\n

2. Along these lines, what about our dominant narratives about women in technology? \u2026.\u201cGirls Learn To Code\u201d programs which treat girls as sites of investment for the future of technology (i.e., the future profits of tech venture capital)? Also, what\u2019s the gender politics of crowdfunding sites? How does the financialized Girl fit into David\u2019s critique of Upworthiness<\/a>?<\/p>\n

3. This is a nerdy theory point: The financialized Girl model suggests that Tiqqun\u2019s Young Girl<\/a> is, as they claim, not <\/i>a gendered concept. If the YG is their metaphor for mainstream Western human capital, then structurally the YG is masculinized–the YG reaps the profits of her investments in herself. The YG is the opposite of the financialized Girl. This means that Tiqqun\u2019s gendering of YG as feminine, then, is really just a way to use a ton of implicit misogyny to critique dominant discourses of human capital–that is, it\u2019s a way for them to transfer the negative associations we have about women and femininity to this concept of human capital.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1] Murphy argues: \u201cHer rates of return are so high precisely because her value begins so low. The girl is an undervalued stock for global finance and for future global economic recover precisely because she is constituted as the \u201cpoorest of the poor.\u201d\u201d The Girl is the cheapest stock available, so with just a small investment it\u2019s possible to sell quite high what you\u2019ve bought quite low.
\n[2] In fact, human capital theory <\/a>was largely a rejection of the Marxist idea of alienation–treating oneself as capital means that you reap the profits from your labor, not your employer.<\/p>\n

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  This is cross-posted from Its Her Factory. In an earlier post, I asked what happens to femininity when the kind of second-shift care work traditionally assigned to women is increasingly a feature of all work, especially conventionally masculinized jobs. This post picks up where that one left off. Here, I\u2019ll use Michelle Murphy\u2019s concept […]<\/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":[],"class_list":["post-18710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18710","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=18710"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18714,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18710\/revisions\/18714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}