Beyond Liberalism: Marxist Feminism,Migrant Sex Work,and Labour Unfreedom

In this article, I use a Marxist feminist methodology to map the organisation of migrant sex workers’ socially reproductive paid and unpaid labour in one city and country of arrival, London, UK. I argue that unfree and ‘free’ (sexual) labour exists on a continuum of capitalist relations of (re)production, which are gendered, racialised, and legal. It is within these relations that various actors implement, and migrant sex workers contest, unfree labour practices not limited to the most extreme forms. My analysis reveals that many migrant sex workers have very limited ‘freedom’. This is in stark contrast to the classical liberal claim of sex worker rights activists and academics that the vast majority of migrant sex workers are free, and therefore not coerced, exploited or trafficked. I then consider whether the emerging labour approach to trafficking could help achieve ‘freedom’ for migrant sex workers. Advocates argue that anti-trafficking efforts must, and can, be refocused on extending minimum labour and social protections to all vulnerable workers. I argue that this approach is disconnected from material interests and history. Rather, migrant sex workers, sex worker rights activists, and all migrant and citizen workers and activists globally must collectively organise against ‘labour unfreedom’ and hence for meaningful control over their labour and lives.     

Socialist emulation in China: worker heroes yesterday and today

Chinese labour heroes represent an idiosyncratic expression of a broader twentieth-century phenomenon of promoting worker emulation through the hailing of model labourers. Taken from a comparative perspective, the Chinese practice can be seen not only as modelled on an earlier Soviet development, but also a broader need felt in totalitarian regimes in the 1930s and 1940s that workers needed to be ‘remoralised’ through the establishment of cults of workers and work. Recently revived in the People's Republic of China in the form of patriotic movies and television shows, the main historical development of the Chinese articulation of this broader historical labour phenomenon is assessed in light of recent studies of Soviet and National Socialist attempts to heroise labour.     

The Value of Relationships: Affective Scenes and Emotional Performances

Many theorists have charted for some time how capital extends its lines of flight into new spaces, creating new markets by harnessing affect and intervening in intimate, emotional and domestic relationships, and into bio-politics more generally. Feminists have known for a long time that women’s ‘domestic’ labour has been central to the reproduction of capital but that it has been made invisible, surplus and naturalised and is rarely taken into account in theories of value. Yet we are now in a bizarre historical moment wherein a format has emerged (reality television) in a major capitalist industry (the media) that is premised upon spectacularly visualising women’s labour in all its forms, especially through its focus on relationships, dispositions and emotional performance. Drawing on an ESRC research project, ‘Making Class and the Self through Mediated Ethical Scenarios’, this paper demonstrates how very different spheres of exchange—economy and affect—have come together, offering possibilities for fusing calculation and care. This process bears remarkable similarity to the legal adjudication of property and propriety in intimate relationships. Yet the paper shows how, as attempts are made to commodify affect, it is precisely affect that exposes and disrupts exchange and enables reality television as a technology of affect to visualise the different types of person-value that are constituted through class and gender relations.     

Sex,Biological Functions and Social Norms: A Simple Constructivist Theory of Sex

Feminist theory needs a constructivist account of biological sex for at least two reasons. The first is that as long as female and male are the only two sexes that are taken for granted, being cisgender, heterosexual, and preferably a parent will be the norm, and being intersexed, transgender, bi- or homosexual, infertile or voluntarily childless will be deemed failure. The second is the fact that, usually, sex and gender come together in the way that is expected, i.e. the fact that most females are women and most males are men needs to be explained. This paper provides a constructivist theory of sex, which is that the sex categories depend on norms of reproduction. I argue that, because the sex categories are defined according to the two functions or causal roles in reproduction, and biological function is a teleological concept involving purposes, goals, and values, female and male are normative categories. As there are no norms or values in nature, normative categories are social constructions; hence, female and male are not natural but social categories. Once we understand that biological normativity is social, biological norms of heterosexuality, fertility, and so on are no longer incontestable. In addition, as many gender norms also concern reproduction—socially mediated reproduction—this simple theory of sex explains the common confluence of sex and gender.     

This is your afterlife: gender,slavery, and televisual subjection

In 1957 Arries Ann Ward, who was formerly enslaved, appeared on the classic television interview-entertainment program, This Is Your Life. Despite Ward’s practices of refusal, the rare interview enacts an idealization of black female servitude and indebted obligation through performances of affection and racial benevolence. Ward’s appearance effectively works to resolve national crisis produced by widespread images of civil-rights protest and counterinsurgent violence, reifying discourses of American exceptionalism in Cold War context.     

Vulnerability in Domestic Discourses on Trafficking: Lessons from the Indian Experience

In recent years, rather than addressing the needs of sex workers themselves or of trafficked persons, international anti-trafficking law has been mobilised towards an ideological end, namely the abolition of sex work. The vulnerability of ??third world?? female sex workers in particular has provided a potent image for justifying state intervention backed by the full force of the criminal law. Moral legitimacy has been afforded to this by a radical feminist discourse which views sex workers as nothing but hapless victims. Drawing on the work of Martha Fineman and legal realists like Robert Hale, this article redeploys vulnerability in trafficking debates to depart from its narrative of victimhood and to offer a renewed critique of liberal legalism, which has in the trafficking context been characterised by legal strategies of criminalisation and the attendant rescue and rehabilitation of trafficked persons. Specifically, it examines how three Indian social legislations regulating bonded labour, contract labour and inter-state migrant labour, and targeted at the domestic trafficking of men, conceptualise vulnerability in substantially different ways when compared to the 2000 Palermo Protocol on Trafficking (at least as it has been enforced to date). To the extent that these Indian laws construe the vulnerability of labour as systemic, trafficking is understood as a problem of labour migration to be addressed primarily by labour law. As such, this view of vulnerability, I argue, not only helps to de-exceptionalise trafficking as always equivalent to the trafficking of women for sex work, and therefore sex work, but also to substantively address the vulnerability of both male and female workers in other labour markets.     

Housework,Wages and Money

Abstract

According to a range of authors and popular commentators, the post-Fordist socioeconomic order has produced a new category of female labourer, the ‘female principal breadwinner’. This article opens out this category of worker to critical scrutiny. We suggest that while the very idea of the female principal breadwinner is open to all manner of existing lines of feminist critique, beyond this it forces a confrontation with a number of issues vital to feminist analyses of transformations to women's labour—both waged and unwaged—in contemporary financialised post-Fordism. We pursue two issues in particular. First, transformations to the labour of social reproduction—including transformations to the measurement and valuation of domestic labour—and second, the financialisation (and shifting capacities) of wages specifically and money more generally. We suggest that if transformations to women's labour are to be fully grasped and understood feminist theory must renew and rethink its analyses of domestic labour, wages and money.     

A Multi-Level Examination of the Association Between Older Social Models in the School Environment and Overweight and Obesity Among Younger Students

Few studies have examined how school characteristics are associated with obesity. The purpose of this study was to examine the student- and school-level characteristics associated with being overweight and obese among 12,049 students in grades 9 and 10 (junior students) attending 76 secondary schools in Ontario, Canada. The sample was 49.2% female and the average age was 14.7 years. Overall, 15.0% of the sample was considered overweight and 6.3% of the sample was considered obese. Multi-level regression analysis revealed significant between-school random variation for the likelihood of a junior student (grade 9 or 10) being overweight or obese. For each 1% increase in the prevalence of obese senior students (grade 11 and 12) at a school, the odds of a junior student at that school being overweight or obese increased significantly. Important student-level characteristics included physical activity, screen time sedentary behaviour (e.g., watching television), participation in varsity sports and gender. Future research should evaluate if the optimal population level impact for school-based obesity prevention programming might be achieved by targeting the schools that are putting students at the greatest risk.     

Non‐capitalist relations of production in capitalist society: The khammessat in Southern Tunisia ∗

The khammessat is one of the most ancient social institutions regulating agricultural labour in the Magrheb. This article seeks to answer three questions: (1) What is the nature of the relationship between agricultural labour and landowner in a society dominated by a non‐capitalist mode of production? (2) What was the impact of capitalism on such labour relations? (3) Is there any possibility of the development, within the khammessat system, of a labour organisation and the demand for rights?     

No Longer Curiously Rare but Only Just within Bounds: women in Scottish history

This article examines the development of women's history in Scotland since the first conference of the International Federation for Research in Women's History (1989). The title is taken from a 1997 article in Scottish Affairs (issue 18), in which Esther Breitenbach asked whether the ‘curiously rare’ women in Scottish history was a case of the ‘suppression of the female in the construction of national identity’. Thus, this study focuses on key themes in the modern period of that history, notably education, the military, politics, labour, religion and literature. It concludes that while the place of women in Scottish history has indeed been asserted since 1989, and different questions are now being asked of the source material, women are still only slowly being integrated into mainstream studies.     

Deepening,and repairing,the metabolic rift

This paper critically assesses the metabolic rift as a social, ecological, and historical concept describing the disruption of natural cycles and processes and ruptures in material human-nature relations under capitalism. As a social concept, the metabolic rift presumes that metabolism is understood in relation to the labour process. This conception, however, privileges the organisation of labour to the exclusion of the practice of labour, which we argue challenges its utility for analysing contemporary socio-environmental crises. As an ecological concept, the metabolic rift is based on outmoded understandings of (agro) ecosystems and inadequately describes relations and interactions between labour and ecological processes. Historically, the metabolic rift is integral to debates about the definitions and relations of capitalism, industrialism, and modernity as historical concepts. At the same time, it gives rise to an epistemic rift, insofar as the separation of the natural and social worlds comes to be expressed in social thought and critical theory, which have one-sidedly focused on the social. We argue that a reunification of the social and the ecological, in historical practice and in historical thought, is the key to repairing the metabolic rift, both conceptually and practically. The food sovereignty movement in this respect is exemplary.     

will the real sex slave please stand up?

This paper critically explores the way in which ‘trafficking’ has been framed as a problem involving organized criminals and ‘sex slaves’, noting that this approach obscures both the relationship between migration policy and ‘trafficking’, and that between prostitution policy and forced labour in the sex sector. Focusing on the UK, it argues that far from representing a step forward in terms of securing rights and protections for those who are subject to exploitative employment relations and poor working conditions in the sex trade, the current policy emphasis on sex slaves and ‘victims of trafficking’ limits the state's obligations towards them.     

The agrarian reform

Around 1860–80 all the central areas of rural women's work in Denmark – spinning, weaving and baking – were gradually taken over by the growing industry in the towns. During the 1880s, also, women's dairy work became a field of male labour in the newly‐established cooperative dairies around the country. The sale of dairy products has played a great role in Danish agriculture and in the national economy from the 1860s until today. The article throws light on the place of women in dairy production until the 1880s and examines the factors which determined their being pressed out of this sort of work. Finally the problems and consequences with which women (and men) were faced when the transition to cooperatives dairies gave rise to an entirely new pattern of work and sex roles are examined.     

Scoring women on their labor changes

Women have less opportunities in the labour market than have men. Theories and material on inequality between the sexes are available, but it is not possible to determine accurately the precise handicap that women experience: an adequate means of measurement is lacking.In this article, the theoretical basis for the new complex variable LCS (Labour Chances Score) is described. LCS is developed to enable the measurement of the labour chances of arbitrary groups on the labour market, and to compare them. The LCS method has made the available qualitative data quantifiable. Scores are measured on the four elements of LCS: (being subject to) regulations; (being subject to) expectations; (unfolding) qualifications; (participation in) communication.The LCS mothod is to be used for policy research, as well in the emancipation of working women. Once a low score on a LCS-element is found, policy can be made to remove it.     

Desublimating monstrous desire: the horror of gender in new extremist cinema

Known for graphic gore and formal experimentation, films of European new extremism stand out for the way in which they combine sex with violence, stressing the body in extreme modes of being and rendering its materiality emphatic, uncanny and profoundly disturbing. While this emphasis on sex and violence has been widely recognized in scholarly literature on new extremism, its connections to gendered conventions of genre cinema have not. In this article, we contend that films such as Philippe Grandrieux's Sombre (1998), Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009) and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001) directly reference gendered tropes and conventions of horror cinema in their explorations of desire, sexual difference and violence. Far from being inconsequential or secondary concerns, we argue that emphatically gendered characteristics of cinematic horror are crucial to the disturbing impact of these films. By appropriating tropes from the horror film, but refusing them the closure and recuperation customary to narrative conventions of the genre, new extremist films critique these gendered implications, calling attention to the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the gender politics of horror.     

Moral judgment and sex role orientation as a function of self and other presentation mode

Gilligan's concern for a negative bias in assessing moral reasoning based on feminine interpersonal orientations and corresponding positive bias in favor of masculine orientations of justice and equity was explored. Bem's Sex Role Inventory provided a psychological index of orientation rather than only biological sex. College men and women completed Rest's moral dilemmas (DIT) in the usual manner-other condition-or assumed the role of the central character-self condition. The latter procedure augmented affective dimensions assumed to underlie orientation differences. Males in the other condition scored higher on the DIT than those in the self condition; females revealed the opposite pattern. Using the sex role categories, it appeared that androgynous males had higher DIT scores in the self condition than in the other condition, in direct contrast to the overall results for males. For females who were androgynous or masculine in orientation, the self condition resulted in higher DIT scores than the other condition. Generally, the greater affective demands in the self condition produced a higher frequency of Stage 3 use for men and women regardless of sex role orientation. The other condition showed a higher percentage of Stage 4 use among males and females independent of sex role orientation. Sex role orientation and affective arousal were discussed in terms of Gilligan's view of moral judgment development.Portions of this paper were presented at the biennial meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, Baltimore, MA, April 1987.Received Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison Current research interests are logical concept development and moral and political development.Received Ph.D. from Purdue University. Current research interests are moral development and life-span changes in cognition.Received Ph.D. from Syracuse University. Current research interests are moral development and adult cognition.     

Chilean women and the UN decade for women

This article analyses two aspects of the reality of Chilean women during the United Nations Decade of Women: political participation and labour force participation. This analysis takes into account some of the proposals of the Regional Plan of Action for the Integration of Women into Latin American Economic and Social Development as well as the consequences of the political, cultural and economic model established by the Chilean military government. The effects of the Decade of Women on Chilean women is not analysed primarily because the specific proposals contained in the Plan of Action are based on the prerequisites of development and participation—which are not applicable to the Chilean case during this period.Notwithstanding the fact that all forms of popular participation have been effectively eliminated, there have emerged women's organizations whose concerns include calling into question the oppression of women on the basis of sex. With respect to labour, women's participation in the labour force has increased. However, this increase is not a response to improved opportunities or a more equalitarian treatment of women workers, but rather as the consequence of elevated unemployment rates especially in lower class families where women have greater access to certain kinds of marginal employment.On a final note, the article also includes a discussion of recent trends in research on women, trends which provide a challenge to the more traditional forms of research.     

The German agricultural worker, 1815–1914

This paper examines the history of the German agricultural worker from the early nineteenth‐century abolition of serfdom up to 1914. Initially, peasant labour services and the compulsory farm service of peasant youth on Junker farms were replaced by contractually hired farm servants and the cottager system. The latter involved the exchange of labour for an allocation of the land, whereby the worker become a petty commodity producer and also an employer of labour, in the form of the ancillary workers (Hofgänger) he was obliged to provide. Subsequently, from the middle decades of the century, this form of labour was increasingly replaced by confined labourers living in tied cottages, who were virtually landless and paid largely in kind; and were therefore effectively economic objects. At the same time, especially from the 1870s, conditions necessitated increasing reliance upon labourers receiving cash wages. However, this category remained relatively small, and largely impervious to socialist ideology, on account of a growing dependence of German agriculture on foreign (Polish) seasonal migrants.