Love And Currency At The New School

, Malcolm A. Kline, Leave a comment

Or not. Macushla Catherine Robinson is offering a course at the Eugene Lang College there based on a 43-year-old feminist call to arms:

“‘They say it is love, we say it is unwaged work.’ So began Silvia Federici’s 1975 manifesto ‘Wages Against Housework.’ Taking Federici’s claim as a point of departure, this course will explore the unrecognized, invisible, poorly remunerated and unremunerated labor that keeps our society afloat. Many forms of labor, which are often not recognized as labor, fall along lines of gender, race and class. Whether changing nappies and washing an endless build of up dishes, caring for elderly and infirm family members, working multiple jobs without legal protection, or bearing up under everyday sexual harassment, constricting gender norms and systemic racism, invisible labor is exhausting. In the era of Google capture and data farming, even that which we understand as leisure – social media and direct TV – are instrumentalized, incorporated. We are all treated as natural resources, whose labor (whether active or passive) is harnessed by corporate entities. In this course, we will read Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Kathi Weeks, Deleuze and Guattari, Jason Moore, Hito Steyerl, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed and others.”