eugene2014 presenting version

Tangled Yarn, Tangled Wires: Women and Millenials Labor towards Digital Globalization

Radhika GajjalaBowling Green State University, Ohio

http://www.radhikagajjala.org

Radhika Gajjala, 2014

Some Key Framing Concepts

• Women’s Labor, Monetizing “free labor” vs Wages for Housework, Leisure as Work, “Digital natives”, Social Entrepreneurship - Global North

• Digital subaltern 2.0 , Digital Globalization and Labor, Access, Inclusion, ICT4D, Micro-loans as Empowerment, Leisure as Empowerment - Global South


Insights drawn from several years of looking at

• Craft networks and Craft communities• Non profits in India• Online Microfinance • Mobile money and ICT4D issues


Development Paradigm and Hierarchies of “Technology”

• Craft production is narrated as “premodern”

• Result of Spacio-temporal compression

• Yet - we see that “traditional” technology such as natural dye and other eco-friendly production processes are now being revived in various locations worldwide (Indonesia, U.S.A., South America, India) and are in practice “new” technology.


Microfinance as tool of empowerment

• Within this hierarchy the unwaged and underpaid workers and producers are made responsible for their own self-empowerment through entreprenuerial initiative.

• Microfinance and Financial inclusion (and related programs of support) are offered as solutions.


Reaching (Digital) Global Markets

Rituals of “staging” and “authenticating”

Digital Subaltern 2.0

DIY Wom-entreprenuer 2.0


Staging Wom-entreprenuers

• Mostly through DIY craft networks in the Global North

• Affective Labor• Unwaged Labor• Digital Labor• Craft as Leisure• Production of Leisure as surplus to be

extracted


Unwaged labor But ultimately the social weakness of the wageless has been and is the weakness of the entire working class with respect to capital.

the availability of unwaged labor, both in the “underdeveloped” countries and in the metropolis, has allowed capital to leave those areas where labor had made itself too expensive, thus undermining the power that workers there had reached. Whenever capital could not run to the “Third World,” it opened the gates of the factories to women, blacks, and youth in the metropolis or to migrants from the “Third World.” Thus it is no accident that while capitalism is presumably based on waged labor, more than half of the world’s population is unwaged.

Federici, Silvia (2012-11-01). Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle


Digital subaltern 2.0

• Staging micro-entreprenuers from Global South• Social entrepreneurs• Nonprofits• Unwaged Labor• Digital Labor• Leisure as per-formative paradigm necessary

for individualized subject formation• Extraction of surplus labor


New Domesticity

• Handmade movements and Slow food movement and DIY

starting in the 1990s, third-wave feminists like the Riot Grrrls, a punk subculture in the Pacific Northwest, began earnestly “reclaiming” traditional women’s work like knitting and embroidery, reappropriating these old-fashioned activities as a form of cool, anticorporate rebellion. This reappropriation helped spark a growing trend for handcrafts and handmade goods— knitted scarves, embroidered tote bags, hand-sewn 1950s-style aprons. The then-new Internet spread this retro, handcrafted aesthetic to all corners of the country, far outstripping its punk rock beginnings. Domestic DIY became cool again.

Matchar, Emily (2013-05-07). Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity (pp. 43-44). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.


the fact that this work is not waged, in a society where work and wages are synonyms, makes it invisible as work, to the point that the services it provides are not included in the Gross National Product (GNP) and the providers are absent from the calculations of the national labor force.

Federici, Silvia (2012-11-01). Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions) (p. 42). PM Press..


Wages for Housework


Digital Philanthropy 2.0

• Global Giving Staged

Millenials and Women as Actors to Stage Digital Philanthropy 2.0


http://www.kiva.org/about/team/volunteers%23interns

Empowered to Empower…(investing in empowerment)

Monetizing Social identities

Monetizing Affective Labor

Monetizing and Measuring “Affective Labor”(when monetizing is equated with “materializing”)

“During the past decades, many reproductive activities formerly performed within the family have become services available on the market….creating the need for an army of female workers increasingly composed of “ethnic minorities” or to immigrant groups whose members are “prepared” to accept lower pay…”

“The ‘salaraization’ of domestic labor…”- Marazzi (2011).


Wom-Entreprenuer 2.0

Individual “resistant” female agency/initiative staged


• Sharing practices in digitally networked hand-craft space instantiate a “bringing forth [of] ghosted bodies and the traumatized remains of erased histories” (Clough, 2007), and allow for the conceptual re-crafting of these ghosted bodies and erased histories through the designing, producing, marketing, selling, and consuming of hand-crafted products. Supply chains and value hierarchies are re-formed and reconnected through old and new intersections and fabrications. The storying and the form of storying guide the formations of platforms for the performances and transmission of affect.

• “…and it is that image that we are supposed to buy. This transformation also entails a fundamental mutation of labor: It is no longer simply physical labor power that is put to work but knowledges, affects and desires” (Read, 2003, pg. 2).

• Excess as surplus – reproductive labor is exerted in drawing out affective labor and tacit practice from thus far non-waged social work and home sphere contexts


Questions I leave you with

• What does this all mean for

• “Globalization, Gender and Development?”

• Add and stir paradigm continues as we train/develop economically dispossessed/displaced bodies “skills” that are associated with unwaged or lower waged bodies (whether that is lower end computer coding, care work or handcraft) as


• “As the commercial says: "You see coffee, Sprint sees data." Indigenous knowledge transformed into database. Trade Related Intellectual property Rights and Trade Related investment measures abreactively punish the collectivities millennially working at the pre-measurable "rural" for not establishing property rights over its value coding. Deforestation-reforestation and the management of waters (for example, cutting down forests that are important to indigenous life- and knowledge-systems, and replanting with eucalyptus, that can produce 75% pulp-wood but depletes the moisture in the soil and disturbs the balance of living organisms in regions drastically; destroying mangrove and salinating arable land to establish foreign direct export shrimp culture and devastating long established human and other life-systems, and the like) belong to the earlier (more commercial) phase but augment the latter. And, the credit-baiting of rural women for phantom micro-enterprise is the latest twist: small-scale commercial-in-the-finance-capital market, where the perennial need of the rural poor is exploited for the commercial sector with no locally operated infrastructural change.”

• • Spivak in Butler, Judith (2007-04-02). What's Left of Theory? (Essays from the

English Institute) (p. 30).


eugene2014 presenting version

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