Sunday Meditations: What Does Work Look Like?
On the Gendered Aesthetics of Work-Labor
The point of Sunday Meditations is to write and publish a brief essay once a week on any given topic. It is an exercise for me to get better at writing and into a healthier writing habit.
A few years ago I read The Human Condition (1958) by Hannah Arendt. There she notes the distinction between work and labor.
Labor relates to how we humans engage with nature. It includes cooking, cleaning, eating, farming, etc. Its defining feature is that it is cyclical: we will always have to clean, cook, etc. These things are a regular, normal part of life.
Work is how we separate ourselves from nature, how we create an artificial nature called society or civilization. Unlike labor, work is goal oriented. Something is planned, built, and finished. A field must be resown and plowed every time we wish to draw food from it. But a house does not need to be built every time we wish to use it. That’s the difference between labor and work.
I want to ask, how does work-labor appear to us? How does it look, sound, smell, etc.? What can we learn about work-labor via an investigation of its appearances, and by implication, what is behind appearances?
Some kinds of work-labor look arduous. Other kinds of work-labor are expected to look effortless. Let’s take a look at both of these.
The Strain of Labor
In this conception, work is expected to appear strenuous. This conception of work is associated with terms such as “blue collar,” “working class,” the “hardness” of work. In fact, I think that this has more to do with labor than with work. There is something about the foundational nature of labor, the way it engages our metabolism with nature, that is felt as somehow “dirty.”
The Grace of Work
In this conception, work is expected to be effortless. It is associated with professionalism, education, artistry and athleticism. This is “work smart, not hard” mentality. In contrast with the strenuous image, I think this has more to do with work rather than labor. If work is how we distinguish ourselves from nature, then grace and effortlessness is part of separating ourselves from dirt, grease, and futility of the natural world.
The Gendering of Work-Labor
In her 1975 essay, “Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Gayle Rubin draws attention to the gendered nature of labor that even Marxism had failed to notice.
The traditional lifecycle of a commodity is production, distribution, consumption. According to Rubin, a stage of preparation exists between distribution and consumption. Food must be cooked, clothes must be cleaned, even the household itself must be prepared for commodity consumption. And it is women who constitute the class most frequently assigned that sort of labor. Notice how that labor (not work, but labor) of the household is hidden in the literal sense of being out of the public eye. But also note that it is hidden in Marxism, the most radical effort to theorize labor exploitation.
If labor is about how we go with nature, and work is about how we separate ourselves from nature, then the feminizing of labor specifically translates to the dehumanizing of women. They are given the animalistic things to do, the cyclical, futile sorts of things that are done blindly, out of necessity. Labor is done for the sake of maintenance against the decaying effects of life. One does not shape reality through labor, but hold nature from shaping one’s own reality.
By contrast, men can transcend, move on, innovate, see themselves embodied in reality through the way they dominate and shape it to their desires. That is the purpose of work, which is planned, executed, and finished, in contrast to the futility of labor. Yet without labor, there can be no work.
When we see preparation as a form of domestic labor that is exploited, then women as such become the working class. In this specific context, there is no remainder between Marxism and feminism: “women” and “working class” are synonymous. That offers escape from the worn-out debates about class reductionism.
Food must be cooked, clothes must be cleaned, even the household itself must be prepared for commodity consumption. And it is women who constitute the class most frequently assigned that sort of labor.
