the feminization of labour in cognitive capitalism

The article starts with a definition of the concept feminization of labour. It aims to signal how, at both the Italian and the global level, precarity, together with certain qualitative characteristics historically present in female work, have become decisive factors for current productive processes, to the point of progressively transforming women into a strategic pool of labour. Since the early 1990s, Italy has seen a massive increase in the employment of women, within the wave of legislation that has introduced various flexible contracts – so-called atypical work. I show how cognitive capitalism tends to prioritize extracting value from relational and emotional elements, which are more likely to be part of women's experiential baggage. The results of a study conducted in November 2006 among freelance workers of the Rizzoli Corriere della sera group, the largest publishing group in Italy, will be used to show how women are able to move more easily on the shifting sands of precarity, within the context of cognitive work.     

images within the precarity movement in Italy

The recent cycle of social struggles against precarity in Italy has been characterized by an extensive use of images representing precarious workers. This contribution explores this in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade (EMP) protest campaign. The subversion of existing popular culture traditions was the main objective of the activists' newly created icons such as San Precario, Serpica Naro and other visual tools. The visual work on gender in the EMP seemed to fill a gap between theoretical work on the feminization of affective and immaterial labour and the less predominant presence of gender. Visual icons seem to have been at least as successful as text messages in publicizing the precarity discourse and their production deserves further attention.     

That’s One Heck of an “Unruly Horse” Riding Roughshod overr Autonomy in Wrongful Conception

The case of Rees v. Darlington Memorial Hospital N.H.S. Trustarises from a lower court backlash against the a prior decision of the British House of Lords in McFarlane v. Tayside Health Board. McFarlane holding that healthy children brought about by negligence in family planning procedures are blessings, and parents should therefore be denied the costs of child maintenance. But, would the House agree with the Court of Appeal in Reesthat the factual variation in that case of a disabled parent with a healthy child should form an exception? In tracing the appeal of Reesto the House of Lords, this note explores their Lordships’ refusal in principle to depart from McFarlane, as well as the invocation of an autonomy-based approach to address the harm of unsolicited parenthood. In reflecting on the extent to which the wrongful conception action can be said to reinforce the value of reproductive autonomy, this note argues, nevertheless, that Reesillustrates in another way a significant departure from McFarlane, but that this is still a turn in the wrong direction. Far from resonating with women’s diverse experiences of reproduction, the law of negligence continues to illustrate little respect for reproductive choice. Therefore, this note calls for a deeper understanding of autonomy, one that recognises and embraces the diversity of individuals’ reproductive lives.     

Simone Téry (1897–1967): writing the history of the present in inter-war France

Simone Téry (1897–1967), French journalist and novelist, joined the French Communist Party in the mid-1930s after visiting the Soviet Union. She worked as a correspondent for L'Humanité, Vendredi and Regards; the latter post took her to Spain during the Civil War. The resulting texts, Front de la liberté: Espagne 1937–1938 (1938) and Où l'aube se lève (1945), form the basis of my analysis of Téry's desire to write the history of the present in inter-war France. These texts, a work of reportage and a novel respectively, illustrate the relationship between the poetic, or imaginative, and the historical, or factual, in historical fiction. This relationship is particularly relevant to the literary history of 1930s France, given the highly politicized nature of literary production in the period and the resulting debates over the nature and future of the realist novel. Téry's rejection of modernism in favour of socialist realism suggests a conversion, common in left-wing writers of the period, to the notion that the modernist text is incapable of ‘containing’ history. The essay raises the question of French women writers’ relationship to committed literature in the 1930s, and demonstrates that women were active in this domain.     

Adventures of Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir's Autobiographies,Women's Liberation,and Self-Fashioning

While The Second Sex is usually taken as Simone de Beauvoir's major theoretical contribution to feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s it was very often through her autobiographies – especially Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, and Force of Circumstance, along with novels such as She Came to Stay and The Mandarins – that her feminist ideas were most thoroughly absorbed. The autobiographies became nothing less than a guide for the fashioning of a new kind of feminine self. Where The Second Sex had intimated that a significant aspect of human liberation lay in women not losing their identity or their sense of self in those of men, it was the autobiographies which suggested and demonstrated in great detail how this might be done. In them, the rejection of conventional marriage and children was no mere slogan, but the foundation of what seemed to young female readers to be a fascinating and challenging life. In this paper, I reflect on de Beauvoir and her historical and contemporary relevance: first through reminiscence and re-reading of the autobiographies themselves; then with an historical examination of how they were read, taking Sydney, Australia, as my example; and finally by offering some reflections on subsequent feminist critique.     

Popular Sexual Knowledges and Women's Agency in 1920s England: Marie Stopes's Married Love and E.M. Hull's The Sheik

This article examines popular discourses of women's sexuality in 1920s England and argues that sex manuals like Marie Stopes's Married Life and sex novels like E.M. Hull's The Sheik, despite their adherence to status quo values, were liberating for women through their affirmation of women's sexual subjectivity. Stopes's enormously popular book contributed strongly to a new understanding of women's sexual drives as natural and autonomous. The changing attitudes were reflected in the numbers of postwar women who actively participated in the creation and consumption of popular sex-novels and films, exercising both economic and sexual freedoms at once. This article focusses on the film version of The Sheik, which experienced great success as part of this growing leisure market catering specifically to women's desire, and in particular on the figure of Rudolph Valentino as a “woman-made” man. The film's “crossed” representations of sexuality (the emancipated “flapper” and the effeminate yet virile “sheik”) challenged traditional notions of femininity and masculinity, and in doing so, were liberating for women consumers at the same time that they threatened the sexual identities of men.     

Violence and Violation: Women and Secure Settings

This article focuses on service provision for women who are involuntarily referred under the UK Mental Health Act (1983) into medium and high security care in England and Wales. We explore how physical and procedural security in such settings is prioritized over relational care (see also Fallon Report, Department of Health, 1999a and NHS Executive, 2000 – Tilt Report). Weare not arguing against the importance of protecting the public from the acts of dangerous members of our society. However, we are arguing that many of the women in our secure services are inappropriately placed and receive inappropriate forms of treatment and care. Rather than physical security, it is high relational care, which the women require. Further, we argue that current service provision often re-produces forms of violence and violation which have marked many of women's lives prior to their entry into the secure system.     

What a Difference a Decade Makes: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Coming to Power</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Second Coming</Emphasis>

A critical look at two books, Coming to Power – Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, published in 1981, and its ‘long awaited sequel’, The Second Coming – A Leatherdyke Reader, published in 1996, yields many differences and similarities. Both books have been judged negatively or positively on the basis of their sadomasochistic content and in line with knee-jerk positions around the lesbian ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s. The feminist politics represented in each book and the connections to more general lesbian feminist concerns and developments of either the late 1970s (Coming to Power) or the late 1980s and early 1990s (The Second Coming) are often overlooked or dismissed. Comparing the kind of sex acts and personas fetishized in each book as well as the claims made for lesbian sm by its adherents often reveals more than the writers may have intended. A more nuanced reading of both books also reveals connections between lesbian feminism, particularly lesbian radical feminism and the sm dykes. Rather than being the ‘illegitimate children’ of lesbian feminism, as Coming to Power maintained in 1981, it is clear now that sm dykes and lesbian feminists are strange sisters who needed each other to define their particular politicized identities.     

interview with Sarah Waters (CWWN conference,University of Wales,Bangor, 22nd April 2006)

Sarah Waters was born in Pembrokeshire in South Wales in 1966. She is the author of four novels, Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999), Fingersmith (2003) and The Night Watch (2006). Among her many awards and nominations one can include the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year (2000), Author of the Year at the British Book Awards (2003), and the South Bank Award for Literature (2003). Most recently, The Night Watch has been short-listed for the Orange Prize. It was my great pleasure to have the opportunity to interview her at the inaugural conference of the Contemporary Women's Writing Network (CWWN), ‘For Love or Money? Contemporary Women's Writing in the Marketplace’, which was held at the University of Wales, Bangor, in April 2006.     

‘The <Emphasis Type="Italic">Purdahnashin</Emphasis> in Her Setting’: Colonial Modernity and the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Zenana</Emphasis> in Cornelia Sorabji's Memoirs

This article focuses on two memoirs written by Cornelia Sorabji in the 1930s – India Calling (1934), and a subsequent book, India Recalled (1936) – in order to explore how discourses of space and place shaped the representations of femininity which structure these texts. Specifically, I will examine Sorabji's apprehensions of femininity in relation to the Muslim and Hindu women she viewed as her legal ‘clients.’ I am equally interested in these texts as evidence of how memory works as a practice of history – how events as they were recalled and recorded in the volatile 1930s and, especially in the wake of the Katherine Mayo controversy, how they helped shape the versions of the respectable feminine produced in her public writing of the period.     

‘Settled in mobility’: engendering post-wall migration in Europe

The end of the bi-polar world and the collapse of communist regimes triggered an unprecedented mobility of people and heralded a new phase in European migrations. Eastern Europeans were now not only ‘free to leave’ to the West but more exactly ‘free to leave and to come back’. In this text I will focus on gendered transnational, cross-border practices and capabilities of Central and Eastern Europeans on the move, who use their spatial mobility to adapt to the new context of post-communist transition. We are dealing here with practices that are very different from those which the literature on ‘immigrant transnationalism’ is mostly about. Rather than relying on transnational networking for improving their condition in the country of their settlement, they tend to ‘settle within mobility,’ staying mobile ‘as long as they can’ in order to improve or maintain the quality of life at home. Their experience of migration thus becomes their lifestyle, their leaving home and going away, paradoxically, a strategy of staying at home, and, thus, an alternative to what migration is usually considered to be – emigration/immigration. Access to and management of mobility is gendered and dependent on institutional context. Mobility as a strategy can be empowering, a resource, a tool for social innovation and agency and an important dimension of social capital – if under the migrants' own control. However, mobility may reflect increased dependencies, proliferation of precarious jobs and, as in the case of trafficking in women, lack of mobility and freedom.     

the ambivalence of colonial desire in Marguerite Duras's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Lover</Emphasis>

This paper analyses the notions of desire and metissage that circulate in The Lover, Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel about an illicit and scandalous sexual relationship between an adolescent French girl and a wealthy Chinese man set in 1920s French colonial Siagon. Rather than celebrate The Lover as a tale of a young French girl's resistance to colonial sexual mores and regulations, this paper seeks to excavate how that resistance both affirms and challenges the racializing and racist dynamics of colonial society. In particular, I explore the intertwining discourses of colonial sexuality, gender, race, and Orientalism that both produced and constrained the specific forms of desire and subjectivities available to and taken up by European women in French Indochina, and that circumscribe the story that Duras is able to tell about the French girl's love affair in The Lover. I suggest that Duras's portrayal of the French girl as a sexually autonomous female subject – one whose erotic relations are not bound by the dictates of colonial patriarchy – is made possible only by the ambivalent structure of the girl's desire, by her simultaneous attraction to and repulsion of the racialized others of the French colonies.     

exorcizing the past: the slave narrative as historical fantasy

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred is a hybrid text: part historical novel, part science fiction/fantasy and part slave narrative. The story transports a contemporary black heroine into 19th-century Maryland in order to explore, recreate and connect with African American narratives of identity. Providing two narrative strands, one in 19th-century Maryland and the other in 20th-century California, the text is able to juxtapose the realities of slavery with its legacy. Conflating these time-periods, Kindred aims to interrogate the marginalization of African American history, but specifically the role black women played in that history, in America's bicentennial year. While Butler adapts what has been regarded as the quintessential African American literary mode of the slave narrative, her fiction consciously draws upon a literary heritage that foregrounds narratives written by black women. Consequently, Kindred highlights the issues and concerns that directly affect the construction of black femininity and its role in the community of slaves as well as examining the historical pressure brought to bear on the configuration of contemporary African American womanhood. In doing so, Butler's fiction articulates the right of black women to intervene in their own construction and to inscribe the existence of black women in stories of originary identity. What this article seeks to explore is how Butler's fiction develops and extends the traditional slave narrative, how this is utilized in order to interrogate the ‘realities’ of both slavery and contemporary US society, and how effective the text is in challenging stereotypical representation of white and black femininity.     

sexyshock: networks that matter

Sexyshock emerged out of a huge demonstration in defence of the Italian abortion law in June 2001. It is a laboratory of communication on gender issues, managed by women but directed towards all genders. It is a public space that gives visibility to women's issues as well as being a permanent workshop on sexuality, a network of women involved in pink/queer activism within a communicative laboratory. As such, Sexyshock is a ‘space of contamination’ between transversal projects which exist among different political institutions and subjects all over Italy and Europe. Her challenge lies in ‘playing with’ and ‘deconstructing’ sexual and identity issues through an ‘open-border’ conception of politics.     

In Love with <Emphasis Type="Italic">Inspector Morse</Emphasis>: Feminist Subculture and Quality Television

This article consists of textual analysis of a highly successful television series, Inspector Morse, combined with qualitative audience study. The study of Morse and the fan culture surrounding it is presented in the context of a discussion of recent feminist work on the texts and audiences of popular culture. The textual analysis focuses on those elements of the programmes which contribute to its success as ‘quality’ television, and particularly on Morse as an example of the role played by nostalgic representations of Englishness in ‘quality’ media texts of the 1980s. The article goes on to discuss whether the presence of such representations in these programmes leads inevitably to a convergence of ‘quality’ and conservative ideology. The discussion of the ideological subtexts of the programmes then focuses on the area of gender representation, and on the extent to which feminist influences are discernible in this example of quality popular culture, particularly in its representations of masculinity. The second part of the article presents an analysis of a discussion group involving fans of the series, which was organized as part of a larger qualitative study of the fan culture surrounding the programmes. There is a detailed discussion of the impact of the social dynamics of the group on their readings of Morse. The analysis also focuses on the ways in which the discourses identified in the textual analysis, such as gender representation, quality and Englishness, are mobilized in talk about the programmes. Finally, the nature of the group made it possible to discuss the construction of a feminist subcultural identity in talk about a mainstream media text, and to identify irony and critical distance as key components of that identity, particularly in the discussion of the pleasures offered by the romance narratives of the programmes.     

Weird Lullaby Jane Campion's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Piano</Emphasis>

This article examines the construction of woman's voice, gaze and desire in Jane Campion's Oscar-winning film The Piano, 1993, with particular reference to the film's central character, Ada, and to the traditional female figures which her character suggests - siren, mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife. It investigates the ways in which The Piano interrogates and disturbs traditional patriarchal narratives, ways of speaking and seeing, and patriarchal constructions of bodily pleasure and desire; revealing these as partial, hard of hearing, short sighted and incapable of pleasure. It argues that while the film succeeds in this interrogation, it goes further in its attempt to envisage forms of speech, sight and pleasure which do not conform to traditional models based on the notion of rigid oppositions between self and other, masculine and feminine, active and passive. Instead, by focusing on mutual pleasure, sensuality, communication and the ability to be moved, it sets in motion ‘other’ ways of experiencing and understanding women's voices, looks, desires.It concludes that The Piano articulates a demand for an encounter with men, in which women are neither marginalized as ‘the feminine’ nor re-incorporated into a patriarchal order; and imagines the possibility of both autonomy and connection, power and pleasure.     

From Goddess Spirituality to Irigaray's Angel: The Politics of the Divine

This article argues that the act of conceptualizing a female divine, whether by socalled low-brow Goddess Spiritualists or high-brow French philosophers, rather than being a mere spiritual exercise, has enormous political significance for feminisms. In particular, I demonstrate that Irigaray's concept of the sensible transcendental, by refiguring a god which is both male and female, transcendent and immanent, theorizes a potential dissolution of the binary logic which forms the basis of western philosophy. The second half of the article looks at the complex role of the angel in Irigaray's theory of the divine in order to demonstrate that, as a result of having misinterpreted the angel's position, critics have failed to recognize the significance and relevance of Irigaray's sensible transcendental for feminist politics.     

Domestic Violence and the Gendered Law of Self-Defence in France: The Case of Jacqueline Sauvage

Legal responses to battered women who kill have long animated scholarly debate and law reform activity. In September 2012 after 47 years of alleged abuse, Frenchwoman Jacqueline Sauvage fatally shot her abusive husband three times in the back. The subsequent contested trial, conviction for murder, unsuccessful appeal and later presidential pardon of Sauvage thrust the French law of self-defence into the spotlight. The Sauvage case raises important questions surrounding the adequacy of the French criminal law in this area, the ongoing proliferation of gendered stereotypes in law and the need for reform. In the wake of the Sauvage case, this article provides a timely analysis of the gendered law of self-defence in France. Drawing from an in-depth analysis of the judgments imposed in the Sauvage case, this article examines the adequacy of French legal responses to battered women who kill and ignites an argument for further law reform.     

remembering home: nation and identity in the recent writing of Doris Lessing

In the UK, the writing of Doris Lessing has frequently been associated with left-wing politics and the second-wave feminist movement. Critics have concentrated primarily on issues of class and gender and have focused their attention on novels published in the 1950s and 1960s. This essay suggests that Lessing's work is over-ripe for reassessment in relation to ideas from post-colonial theory. Her writing repeatedly addresses questions about national identity and its imbrications with ‘race’. These ideas intersect in complex ways with her more familiar analysis of gender and class. This essay discusses Lessing's recent novel The Sweetest Dream (2001), which was widely read as an attack on the political idealism of the 1960s. It relates the novel to her collection of essays, African Laughter (1992), her recent essay on the situation in Zimbabwe, ‘The Jewel of Africa’ (2003) and the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade (1997). Zimbabwe (previously Southern Rhodesia) is of crucial importance in these works. The article explores how Lessing makes use of notions of city, home and memory that can be instructively compared with some of Toni Morrison's ideas in her novel Beloved (1987) and the essays ‘Home’ (1998) and ‘The Site of Memory’ (1990). Lessing revises the notion of ‘home’ so that it becomes capable of both recognizing racial and national differences and moving outside them. She also interprets memory as productive for the individual and the nation only when it becomes, as Morrison would say, ‘rememory’: when it can acknowledge the importance of imagination in dealing with trauma and thus suggest the fluctuating, mobile status of identity. The article demonstrates that similar ideas about home and memory are present in her fiction, essay and autobiography, indicating that her intention is to explore generic classification and blur the boundaries between different methods of writing personal and political history. Lessing's work strongly suggests the possibility that apparently ‘fictional’ writings may be more fruitful than ostensibly factual ones in allowing individuals and nations to make sense of their immediate pasts.     

Discursive Desire: Catherine Belsey's Feminism

This is an account of an interview with one of Britain's foremost literary theorists, Professor Catherine Belsey. The interview was conducted in Ghent, Belgium in 1997. The discussion spans all of Belsey's works, from the earliest, Critical Practice (1980), to her latest publication, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (1999). In this piece, Belsey openly and unpretentiously discusses her feminist commitment, her sometimes controversial critical positions, some of the influences on her careers and the importance to her of her teaching.