Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

A typical example is the novel growth of the body industry—ranging from the health club to the massage parlor, with its multiple—sexual, therapeutic, emotional—services, and the industries that have been created around jogging (the popularity of jogging is by itself an indication of the new general awareness that you have to “take care of yourself”

Finally it seemed to us that posing “getting a job” as the main condition for becoming independent of men would alienate those women who do not want to work outside the home, because they work hard enough taking care of their families, and if they “go to work” they do it because they need the money and not because they consider it a liberating expe

Compared with assembly-line work, “affective labor” may appear more creative, as workers must engage in a constant rearticulation or reinvention of their subjectivity, choose how much of their “selves” to give to the job, and mediate conflicting interests. But they must do so under the pressure of precarious labor conditions, an intense pace of wor

Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited.

Last, Hearn’s discussion of “self-branding,” in reality TV, directly challenges the assumption that affective labor is a creative activity or a vehicle for self-expression. It shows that while drawing from the emotions and personality of the workers, the selfhood performed is shaped by specific dictates and disciplinary structures, and the selling

It is not an accident, then, if most men start thinking of getting married as soon as they get their first job. This is not only because now they can afford it but also because having somebody at home who takes care of you is the only condition of not going crazy after a day spent on an assembly line or at a desk.

In a work context characterized by cost-cutting, competition, and a strict regimentation of work, such that everything, from dress codes to toilet breaks, is regulated and enforced through multiple forms of surveillance, focus on affect and interactivity in worker-management and worker-customer relations is more conducive to the interiorization of

the anticolonial movement taught us to expand the Marxian analysis of unwaged labor beyond the confines of the factory and, therefore, to see the home and housework as the foundations of the factory system, rather than its “other.”

If we assume that every struggle must end up in a redistribution of poverty we assume the inevitability of our defeat.