"Affective Labor and Feminist Politics"

by Oksala, Johanna (2016)

Abstract

This article discusses the political potential of Michael Hardt?s and Antonio Negri?s influential notion of affective labor for feminist theory and politics. The argument proceeds in two stages. I begin by briefly explicating Hardt?s and Negri?s concept of affective labor and outline what I see as its potential benefits for advancing critical feminist thought and political imagination. In the second part of the article I turn to a critical evaluation of the notion in connection with feminist politics. While I acknowledge the strengths of this concept in characterizing contemporary laboring practices, I nonetheless want to expose its shortcomings in advancing feminist politics. I contend that in order to imagine effective political responses to the problems currently facing us, feminist politics needs theoretical distinctions within the category of affective labor that allow us to advance a political and ethical problematization of our current forms of work.

Key Passage

Foucault’s claim that there is no outside to power relations also morphs in Hardt’s and Negri’s writings into the claim that there is no outside to the process of capitalist production. “Production becomes indististinguishable from reproduction,” “subjects are at the same time producers and products of this unitary machine,” and it is “no longer possible to identify a sign, a subject, a value, or a practice that is ‘outside’” ð2000, 385Þ. While such a comprehensive understanding of capitalism as a sphere of biopolitical production with no outside seems to have radical political potential in breaking with narrow economism and in bringing together all kinds of seemingly separate struggles as struggles against capitalism—feminist, indigenous, and ecological struggles as well as various democratic struggles— such an extensive understanding in fact turns out to be politically debilitating. It makes resistance against capitalism hard to imagine because it obfuscates the fact that capitalist societies, and our daily lives in them, are organized through various competing and divergent normativities, which are in constant struggle and tension with one another. While the normativity specific to capitalist economic production promotes such objectives and values as economic growth, efficiency, free competition, and equal exchange, for example, we are also daily engaged in social practices and human relationships that are based on very different normativities that would make no sense if assessed strictly economically. (p.289)

Keywords

Feminism, Feminist Politics, Hardt, Negri, Foucault, Critical Feminism, Power

Themes

On Foucault, Foucault

Links to Reference

• https://doi.org/10.1086/682920
• http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/682920
• https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/682920?casa_token=cpVst6bz2DQAAAAA:ynv6kWHmc37Uj93fq-LEGHxqHHNs3yX0NlWANvyNJbhKrB_JriRqF_41N5TGUtzm2zgO8cQXHjwI
• https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1086/682920?casa_token=wqUCLu5exQoAAAAA:IInN8AcCdS2e3h0s1baKUmXSAcyPtgmOxPRJDTuAP61nQrcMKtOTds_snVbc9HO7lytlbOTZqlnJ

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