Neoliberalism and Work in the Home

The following is an article by me originally published in the December 2010 print edition of Linchpin. It has also been published online at Linchpin.ca and at Z-Net.

Neoliberalism and Work in the Home
by Scott Neigh

"If your Mom didn't take care of you [when you were a child], would you be able to go to work?"

Those are the words of trade union activist, graduate student, and single mother Laurel O'Gorman. They are her way of neatly capturing the idea that without the massive amounts of unpaid work done in the home, primarily by women, capitalism would grind to a halt.

And through the neoliberal changes of the last thirty years -- paid work that has become more precarious and more poorly paid, governments that have radically scaled back support for people in need, different groups of workers increasingly subjected to different rules -- the burdens of unpaid work have increased significantly. Yet many unions and community groups are still in the early stages of figuring out how to recognize and respond to the central importance of unpaid caring and domestic labour.

Women's Work and Invisibility

"Women's labour is often the most exploited," according to Sharmeen Khan, an organizer and spokesperson for the Toronto Community Mobilization Network that put together much of the infrastructure that groups used for protesting the G20 summit in June. Pressure that gives women fewer options other than to engage in work that is underpaid or unpaid "is a strategic way of maintaining profit for a few... The unpaid labour that is often invisible is strategic in that."

The invisibility Khan refers to shows up even in how many of us talk about what we do, where the word "work" is so often used to refer only to what we are paid to do. Caring for children and older adults, preparing food, cleaning, doing laundry, getting groceries, and the dozens of other tasks that make life possible get relegated to an assumed but undefined space that not only ignores their importance but ensures that they are often not seen as work at all. The invisibility when unwaged tends to correspond with poor pay and low status when this kind of work is done for a wage.

According to researchers Leah Vosko and Lisa Clark, despite modest increases in the proportion of such work done by men over the preceding decades, the time devoted to unpaid work by working age men and women still differed considerably in Canada in 2005. Men performed, on average, 3.5 hours a day of unpaid work, compared to 7.3 hours for women. In households with a child under age six, the averages shifted to 6.1 hours for men and 12.6 hours for women.

This invisibility has many expressions in public policy as well. For instance, in the years that O'Gorman's time was dominated by unpaid work in her home, her then-partner was working at a trade. Both are now pursuing further education -- he qualifies to access grant funding under a government "second career" program because his earlier work was waged, but she is able to access education only through taking on debt because her earlier work was unpaid. She said, "In my life, this is the most visible example of how unpaid work doesn't matter and everything is about waged work...because what I was doing wasn't 'work.'"

Neoliberalism

Professor Pat Armstrong is a political economist who teaches at York University in Toronto, Ontario, who has done research on women's work for more than forty years, most recently with a focus on healthcare. She said that the "most obvious" way neoliberalism has increased pressure to engage in unpaid work in Canada is "in cutbacks of what we call the welfare state." This refers to the array of social programs enacted mostly after the Second World War which provide services in ways that socialize the costs and which support people living in need. Particularly since the mid-1990s in Canada, the welfare state has been under attack by business lobbies and many governments.

She says that in the healthcare sector, this means people are sent home from hospital "sicker and quicker" -- less care is provided by nurses and doctors, and now "most of that care is provided unpaid in the home...mostly by women." The limited public dollars for homecare services are also now more often taken up caring for people who have been discharged from acute care hospitals so there are fewer resources to care for frail and elderly people (who are most often women) so it is generally family (again, mostly women) who have little choice but to take on that work.

Armstrong adds that it is evident from how governments have talked about the issue that this is not an unforseen side-effect. Rather, "it is clearly part of the current healthcare strategies to do as much as possible by unpaid labour."

Khan points out how neoliberal changes have affected different groups of women in different ways. For instance, as poverty has increased and accessibility of services related to care provision has decreased, more and more poor women in Canada have simply had no good options. "A lot of the women who are in poverty do work hard, do work all the time" both in low-wage jobs and at unwaged work, but "rather than the state intervening to provide affordable childcare, the state will intervene only when there is neglect."

In contrast, a response to this burden by some affluent households is to hire other women to perform domestic and caring labour, often poor and working-class women of colour brought to Canada as part of the Live-in Caregiver Program. This program subjects these women to much more oppressive rules for work than Canadian citizens have to face, including having to live with their employer, limited access to social services, restrictions on basic employment rights and on pursuing other work, and the threat of deportation if they demand better treatment. This is part of the "labour apartheid" that is the "essence of neoliberalism," according to Khan. She added, "The lack of childcare support in this country has normalized this experience of hardship."

In Struggle

Many public sector unions, like the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), have some awareness of the issue and respond by both political and workplace efforts to strengthen the welfare state. The idea is that high quality, accessible, not-for-profit services would give communities more options for meeting caring needs. As well, fighting to transform the low pay and precarious, casual character of caring work when it is waged would help to increase its overall status, including when it is unwaged.

CUPE also enacts measures to reduce barriers to participation by its own members who might face burdens from unpaid caring and domestic labour, such as funding childcare during union events. O'Gorman, who is the president of the newly formed CUPE Local 5011, which represents graduate teaching assistants at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, said, "Overall, I've found that CUPE has really worked on that," and cited numerous examples of how it has facilitated her participation. Still, she also cited other instances where barriers remain, and both in the position of her local as it goes into bargaining and her experience so far of processes within the union beyond the local level, the gendered impacts of unpaid domestic labour have not been a major focus of attention.

Armstrong, who has worked extensively with unions and community groups over the years, confirms that unions have some awareness of the issue and could be an important force in addressing it, "but I don't think it's at the top of their agenda, partly because they are so squeezed" by the many neoliberal attacks on the labour movement.

Progressive and radical "do-it-yourself" alternatives that seek to avoid reliance on the welfare state through local community-based initiatives have at times advanced some interesting co-operative models. However, these sorts of experiments are rare in Canada, and they often do not address the gendered burden of unpaid labour or the ways in which many poor and working-class women already do incredible levels of waged and unwaged work.

Even in the most visible mobilization against neoliberalism in recent years in Canada -- the protests against the recent G20 summit in Toronto -- this issue was largely absent. Though gender justice was one of the key themes of the organizing, and Khan said that issues of women's work were definitely present in the initial discussions she was part of, it mostly did not show up in what both mainstream and activist publics saw in June.

She cited a number of reasons for this. One was the general mainstream media disinterest in the issues motivating dissent against the G20, and their nearly exclusive focus on protest tactics. In addition, she related it to "the weakness of the women's movement right now."

However, she also said that after the Harper government advanced an agenda for maternal health in developing countries that excluded funding for abortion services (and, initially, contraception as well), many of the larger organizations involved in protesting the G20, including labour and women's groups, focused their gender justice-related energies almost exclusively around a version of reproductive choice wrapped in "a very simplistic analysis" and then "kind of wanted to shut out any other narrative, like around unpaid reproductive labour."

Khan said choice "is important for sure, but there was a complete lack of analysis about what the G20, the IMF, the WTO do to women's lives." Through their role in reorganizing work and in imposing a host of other changes, she sees these neoliberal institutions in their entirety and not just individual policies as incredibly harmful to women around the world. She would have liked to have seen "more connections to different women's movements in different parts of the world to make our analysis more concrete about how the G20 affects different groups of women."

However movement organizations in Canada take up questions of unpaid caring and domestic labour, organizer John Clarke of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (which he admits has also not directly addressed the question) thinks it is crucial that they do so.

"When a society starts to impose on women and demand they perform for free labour that social service networks have performed, there will be a period of adjustment in which people will do what they need to do to get by," he said. However, "there are only so many hours you can cut out of your sleep, only so much effort you can put in before it becomes unendurable." For this reason, he thinks it is imperative that these issues "find political expression in the near future."

For more of Scott's writing please see his blog.

What Is Intellectual Work?

I recently published an initial post in what will become a short series reflecting on my choices related to doing intellectual work outside of the academy. In that post, I avoided actually defining what I mean by "intellectual work," so I'm going to do that now.

The Doer and the Product

I wrote a little bit in the first piece about the dominant assumptions that are drummed into us about what intellectual work is. You would think that the core of defining anything described as "work" would be the description of a particular kind of activity. Yet it is fascinating to me that the boundaries that the dominant assumptions about intellectual work outline are not directly about activity at all. They do not leave us with a clear sense that if any of us were to do X, Y, and Z today, we would be broadly recognized as doing intellectual work. Instead, the dominant cluster of assumptions has more to do with the identity of the doer and the form and character of the product, while the activities engaged in by the doer as they produce the product are left somewhat mysterious.

The 'who' whose doing is most easily accepted as intellectual work is most often the holder of some sort of advanced degree, and often a salaried employee in a university or other sort of institution devoted to such work. Occasional allowance is made for the isolated genius, who may be detached from normal human society not by credentials and institutional location but by personal ability and quirk, though more commonly not only those things -- generally the popular cultural figure of the 'mad scientist' has a PhD, even if s/he works at creating the living dead in a rundown warehouse rather than curing cancer in a university hospital, though often the 'reclusive novelist' who produces 'great literature' must rely more on quirk and product than a fancy piece of paper to make her suitably 'not like the rest of us' for her labours to be treated as intellectual work. The products that define 'real' intellectual work, in the more common instance when they are not interested in consuming the brains of the living, are usually understood to be texts that are hard for ordinary people to read, and that would be of little interest to them anyway because they are disconnected from 'real life.'

Those are the direct categories. They map quite strongly onto a lot of other social divisions, often in ways related to the distinction that works its way through so much Western thought between body and mind. Being female, racialized, and/or working-class have been historically associated not just with having your socially mandated and permitted activities organized in ways that present barriers to doing certain kinds of intellectual work and that define out of social recognizability much of the intellectual work that you do, but also with the oppressive assumption that you just have an inherently more physical way of being in the world. The life of the mind has historically been explicitly permitted, broadly recognized, and assumed to be a result of inherent characteristics in those who bear maleness, whiteness, and class privilege. That may not be quite as starkly reflected in the composition of those who gain access today to the credentials and institutional spaces that allow one to define what one does as intellectual work, but there is plenty of powerful writing out there about how universities and similar institutions are usually to this day hostile spaces for women and men of colour, white women, and working-class people. It is also notable that when people with the right credentials, in the right institutions, start to produce work that ceases to conform with disciplinary and institutional norms, its legitimacy (and theirs) is challenged, and that this happens more often and more starkly when such work comes from people who already face the experience of being treated like they don't quite belong because of their race, class, and/or gender.

The Activity

I think it makes a lot more sense to start from the activity, the actual work being done. I would like to start with a broad definition, too, and narrow down from there to the particular subset of intellectual work that I'm talking about in this series of posts.

So here is my defintion: Intellectual work is activity devoted to making sense of the world, which is often but not always connected to forming judgments about acting in the world.

Perhaps someone else will point out a way in which this definition includes things that don't really make sense as intellectual work, or leaves out things that inarguably should be included. But I like it because not only does it focus on grounded doing rather than the identity of the doer or the character of the product, it also includes a number of apparently different kinds of activities which are all worth understanding as intellectual work.

An obvious one that is relevant to me is that it captures the various things that I have done that I have come to see as intellectual work -- journalistic writing and radio in alt/indy contexts; this blog; community-based research reports for social service agencies; book reviews; op-ed piece; my book; lots of media releases and pamphlets written as part of participation in movement groups; even the handful of scientific papers I got my name on as an undergrad; and the smattering of hired-gun technical writing I've done from time to time. All of those involve me making sense, making meaning, from the world -- mostly the social world, but not in every instance.

This definition also captures intellectual work as conventionally understood, i.e. many things that academics do as part of their jobs. This is work that results in laboratory research on auto-immune disease and air pollution, in new theories about medical education, in historical sociology about the attacks on queers by the canadian state, in philosophical musings on whiteness and knowledge production, in explorations of the works of 16th century woman authors, in writing about the lineages of folk songs in rural Nova Scotia, in the study of ancient Sanskrit texts. It may or may not be interesting to very many people. It may or may not produce knowledge that has any redeeming political value. It may or may not be comprehensible to more than half a dozen other people on the planet. But even if it is obscure and the corner of the world it is making sense of is obscure -- subatomic particles, minute variations in the whistling of song birds, analysis of stories by an author hardly anyone likes, a language long dead -- it is still making sense of the world, and it is still intellectual work.

Perhaps most important among the things that this definition captures that conventional understandings of intellectual work erase is the kind of theorizing that all of us do in our everyday lives, which some authors particularly draw attention to in the context of navigating everyday experiences of oppression. For example, a woman in a physically abusive relationship has no choice but to develop practical theory for guiding her choices. She may or may not ever communicate it to anyone else. It may or may not have much reach beyond her immediate circumstances (that is, it may or may not have much to say about how those circumstances were extra-locally organized). It may or may not be enough to protect her in any given moment. But there is no doubt that this situation requires the woman in it to constantly do work to make sense of her world -- that is, to do intellectual work. Similarly, a person of colour who exists in white-dominated spaces constantly does intellectual work around the racism they face, and a closeted gay man is constantly making sense from signals of safety and danger and the heterosexist dynamics of his everyday life. And anyone who has talked to, say, mine workers, can't help but be blown away by the keen insight many of them have developed about both technical processes in ore refining and the global issues affecting their industry, metal prices, and labour relations. The conventional assumptions about intellectual work would completely erase all of these things, but I think any halfway useful understanding has to capture it.

Narrowing the Field

In this series of posts, though, I'm not talking about all aspects of intellectual work, as understood above. My intention is to use these posts to think through a particular area of my own experience, so there are lots of kinds of intellectual work that I won't talk much about. I've already been quite explicit, for example, that I'm mostly talking about intellectual work done outside of the academy -- not exclusively, but mostly. And I think there are two other ways to narrow the kind of intellectual work that I'm talking about here.

Intellectual work can be done entirely for the use of the person doing it and perhaps a very small, intimate circle -- the theorizing done by the woman surviving abuse, for example, at least in some instances. I think that it is useful to distinguish between that kind of everyday intellectual work, on the one hand, and intellectual work that is done with the deliberate intent of producing knowledge for purposes of communication. That is, I think there are some important specificities, some meaningful differences in goals and constraints, for making sense of the world that is done with the intention of more broadly informing the sense-making processes of other people. You could think about this as intellectual work as vocation. I don't mean that word in the narrow sense of paid employment, but more to echo the older meanings of the term as something which you feel called to do -- perhaps by the pull of money, but also perhaps spiritually, politically, philosophically, or through some other mix of drives. I also don't think it should be treated as any more important or as somehow more intellectual than everyday intellectual work, but it is subject to different priorities and pressures, and I think it is useful to talk about it as distinct in some ways.

This more vocational intellectual work still covers a lot of ground, including ground that I don't think I can legitimately talk about. For instance, I think it includes lots of people who express their vocational intellectual work in primarily oral, unmediated ways. You could think about the role taken on by many indigenous elders on Turtle Island as doing a specific kind of vocational intellectual work -- they make sense of the world, and they see it as part of what they are called to do to share the results of that sense-making with others who are on their own journeys to make sense of the world. In a similar way, I think many working-class leftists in generations past did something similar, and deliberately shared the results of their own extensive efforts to make sense of the world in oral ways with co-workers in the same factory or lumber camp or mill.

Again, these are absolutely crucial examples of intellectual work -- of vocational intellectual work -- but I'm not sure I can say much about them. They are very embedded in immediately experienced relations which are very local and specific. The dynamics shaping how that work is done probably differ quite a bit from my own circumstances. My own work, and the work that I'm most concerned about in these posts, is vocational intellectual work that is intended to be communicated in mediated ways. It results in a book, an article, a radio signal, a podcast, a pamphlet. Because of this, the social relations shaping how that work happens are very different than for unmediated vocational intellectual work, and so I think it is meaningful to talk about it, at least in some ways, on its own. (I would be tempted, by the way, to include things like formal teaching in this category even though it is done orally and directly, because it isn't done in the context of organic, existing webs of relationships. Rather, it is a kind of amplification of voice that happens in institutionally mediated ways.)

To recap: Intellectual work is any activity which involves making sense of the world, which often but not always is connected to making judgments about how to act in the world. The particular kind of intellectual work that I'm writing about in these posts is work that is done with a certain kind of explicitly embraced purpose (a sense of vocation) to make sense and to communicate it to others, and is communicated in mediated ways.

In the next post in this series, I will talk more about what it means to think about the social character of intellectual work.

A Passing

I don't have time to do a long post, but I wanted to pass along that I just found out that noted Mohawk legal scholar and activist Patricia Monture has passed away. I never had the chance to meet Monture, but her writings are very powerful and they played an important role for me in my initial learning, as a settler, about indigenous struggle on Turtle Island. (See here and here for things I've written about a couple of her books, and here for a review of an important collection that came out of a network of scholars in which she was a senior figure.) My condolences to her family and friends. Her passing is a great loss to struggles for justice and liberation in northern Turtle Island.

(Thanks to R.M. for the link.)

Support USW Local 1005 in Hamilton!

I lived in Hamilton for ten years, and it was common for me to encounter and work with activists from United Steel Workers Local 1005 in peace and social justice groups in the community. Hard work over decades by activists with a range of different left politics kept 1005 a vibrant political space in ways that simply isn't true of a lot of other industrial locals. Since I've moved away from the city, 1005 -- which represents workers at the former Stelco, now U.S. Steel Canada -- has come under unprecedented attack. The most recent development is that they have been locked out since November 7, 2010, after the union refused to give in on significant changes that would particularly impact pensioners and new hires.

For background and regular updates from the union, see here. And here is a video describing the current state of things:



As is often the case when North American industrial unions respond to neoliberalism, I take issue with the nationalism in which they package their struggle because I think it ultimately does more harm than good. However, the threat to working people is real and we should all inform ourselves and act however we can in support, for much the same reasons as I wrote about an earlier struggle here in Sudbury.

(Thanks to Alex for the video link.)

Starting to Reflect on Intellectual Work Outside the Academy

When people ask me what I do, I tell them that I am a writer. This is an accurate answer. It is also a hard-won answer -- for all that creativity guru Julia Cameron insists that a writer is nothing more or less than someone who writes, my journey between becoming someone who writes and being able to identify as such without cringing, blushing, or offering disclaimers took years. And if, in some moments, in some contexts, I augment "writer" with "researcher and media producer" to capture some of the places writing has taken me in ways that others will recognize, it's still all the same thing to me.

Yet "writer" is not the only label that would work, and "writing" is not the only way to describe what I do. I have come increasingly to see that much -- perhaps all, though I'm not sure -- of the writing-related work that I have done over the last dozen years can be understood as being within the larger category of "intellectual work." Now, by that phrase I mean something narrower than the way it might be used to capture all kinds of non-physical labour, but also something considerably broader than dominant assumptions about what "work done by intellectuals" might look like. I'm going to leave defining exactly what I mean by it for a later post -- for now I'm going to ask you to bear with me.

This shift in frame from "writing" to "intellectual work" is not intrinsically important, beyond the fact that the broadening that it involves allows me to use my own experiences as a basis for some broader and somewhat differently focused reflections than if "writing" were my starting point. Both ways of talking about what I do are accurate and valuable, and most of the time I will continue to identify as a writer, as the most accurate and legible way of describing what I do with a significant chunk of my time. However, the shift to being able to think about my activities in the broader frame of "intellectual work" has correlated for me with (though is not necessarily causally related to) other shifts in how I think about what I do.

In our journey through life in early 21st century North America, we are presented with a particular dominant cluster of ideas about what intellectual work is, who can do it, and where it can happen. It is mostly understood as happening at universities or perhaps in other rarified institutional environments. It is mostly understood as being done by people with many fancy letters after their names. It is occasionally understood as being done by peculiar people who have withdrawn from 'normal' society in other, more individualistic ways. It is mostly understood as being about content that is of little relevance to the lives of most ordinary people. It is mostly understood to result in texts with particular forms -- people who have been kept distant from this kind of work might hold that understanding in as general a ways as thinking that the products of intellectual work have to be obscure and difficult, while those more familiar with the process might identify particular kinds of texts (the monograph, the journal article) and particular disciplinary and institutional norms for how the knowledge they contain is put together. We can find exceptions to each of these that would be broadly recognized as intellectual work, but these points sketch out both the norm to which such work is compared and the pinnacle to which such work is expected to aspire. This, I think, is not a good way of understanding intellectual work, as I'll explain in future posts, but it is where we start from. (These characteristics also, it should be added, describe aspects of a culture in which intellectual work functions as a marker and organizer of both intellectual elitism and of virulent anti-intellectualism, both of which obscure and support oppressive and exploitative social relations.)

One of the shifts in me that has made this shift in frame possible is that in the last decade or so this cluster of misconceptions has loosened its grip on me considerably. I'm not sure exactly why, but I think perhaps it is partly due to becoming much more familiar with the spaces where much of such work supposedly happens and the people who inhabit those spaces -- that is, academia and academics -- so the reality of them has become more clear to me. It may also be that I've had more years of taking in work that just doesn't fit those misconceptions, and more years to appreciate and understand various sorts of criticisms of them, as articulated by various clever feminist and anti-racist and other critical writers. This loosening has allowed me more space to see "intellectual work" as a category that might apply to various things that I have done in a way I couldn't before.

Another shift, however, has been that more of the work that I do has actually come to look more like dominant ideas of what "intellectual work" should be. Not that much or any has appeared in the venues or forms that are considered legitimate, and not that it is at all guided by disciplinary norms of any kind. But more of what I write has something of an academic flavour than it did ten years ago, with both the useful and less-than-useful implications that come along with that, and I also more often read work produced in academic spaces. Note that I'm not saying this is either a good thing or a bad thing, or that what I do now is more legitimately intellectual work than what I did back then, just that the greater similarity with dominant misconceptions has made it easier to see what I do as fitting in that category.

The final shift, and perhaps the most interesting, is that I have gradually come to appreciate in a more grounded way the social character of what I'm doing. That is, I am more able to see my work not just as an individual activity -- as primarily about the relationship between me and the page -- but as a social one -- one that is embedded in all sorts of other relationships. By developing a better understanding of my place in these relationships, I have been able to develop a more grounded understanding of intellectual work in general, and also a more grounded understanding of what I do and of how to usefully think about making decisions about what I do.

It is in that spirit that I decided to write -- well, initially it was going to be one post on this topic, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized there are at least four posts beyond this introductory one that I could write, perhaps more.

Here are some of the key questions about intellectual work done outside the academy that I'm going to work through in several posts over the next little while:

• What is intellectual work?
  
• What does it mean to think about the social character of intellectual work?
  
• Why might someone want to do intellectual work outside of the academy?
  
• What are the challenges of finding space in life to do intellectual work outside of the academy?
  
• What are the challenges in terms of figuring out what work to do and how to do it?
  

How I break it all up may or may not correspond directly to those questions, and more may occur to me as I write, but that's where I'm starting from.

Blatant Sexism as 'Humour' in a Sudbury Newspaper

I've never understood the claim that when you say awful things about a person or a group of people, but you intend it to be funny, then those awful things magically cease to be awful and turn into light hearted fun that we should all just enjoy. This claim usually doesn't get made directly, but it is fairly openly present in the most common responses you hear when you challenge awfulness-packaged-as-humour. You hear "it was just a joke," and that anyone who was upset needs to "lighten up" and "get a sense of humour."

Because I've never really understood those kinds of responses, I'm finding it hard to write something that will preempt the predictable defensiveness by the editors of a Sudbury-based community paper called South Side Story which published some misogyny under the guise of humour on page 15 of its October 2010 issue. Someone I know a little bit in the Sudbury community drew it to my attention, though, so I feel I have to write something.

South Side Story is a monthly community newspaper that focuses on short pieces intended to be humorous or quirky, with occasional pieces about home decor or useful but not groundbreaking health-related things like the latest breast cancer fundraiser or the basics of COPD. The closest comparison I can find for the majority of its non-advertising content is the short, quirky factoids and anecdotes that grace Reader's Digest. So South Side Story is not in any sense a journalistic publication. Nonetheless, like any publication, it still needs to be responsible for its content.

The article in question is called "Wanna Be A Real Woman?" The text of the piece consists of 23 bullet points, each of which is a juicy nugget of blatant sexism. The items include:

• Silence, the final frontier -- Where no woman has gone before.
  
• The undiscovered side of banking -- How to make deposits.
  
• Nag Nag Nag -- how to overcome your tendency to be a fish wife.
  
• Communication Skills I -- Tears as the last resort and not the first.
  
• Driving a car safely -- A skill you can also acquire.
  
• Managing your weight -- It's not water retention, it's fat.
  
• PMS -- Your problem, not his.

I am, regretfully, not making this up. South Side Story doesn't publish online so I can't link you to the complete piece and I'm not sure it's worth my energy to type all of the items in, but this gives you a representative flavour of what is on offer.

The reasons to find this content objectionable seem so obvious to me that I'm tempted not to say anything more, just to encourage those of you who share these objections to publishing material that is so insulting to women and pretending it is 'humour' to communicate this to the folks who produce South Side Story -- you can email them at southsidestory@eastlink.ca; you can telephone them at 705-523-2339; and you can send them a letter at South Side Story, Regency Mall, 469 Bouchard, Suite 204, Sudbury, Ontario, P3E 2K8. But I know that such poor editorial judgment always has its defenders, so I'll try to preemptively address some of that.

The most likely approach do defending this piece is, as I said at the beginning of my post, that people will claim that it is humour, not serious, and so should not be taken seriously. In response, I would say that people need to think about what makes it plausible to think that this might work as humour. I would argue that in order for a writer or editor to plausibly think that large numbers of readers might relate to a piece like this, the items on the list must make reference to some sort of shared commonsense understanding of the category in question -- in this case, the category is "woman." If you were to add things like, "Oh, those women...always eating the green jelly beans and leaving the yellow ones for the menfolk" or "Isn't it frustrating how women always dress up like lumberjacks?" it would make no sense as humour, or at least as the kind of humour that this article is attempting -- maybe as some sort of absurdist something-or-other, but that's already a completely different approach than this article is taking. And the reason those random statements don't even potentially work as the sort of humour featured in "Wanna Be A Real Woman?" is because they do not reference the shared cultural commonsense that, indeed, the piece's title quite blatantly points us towards.

The content of this dominant shared cultural commonsense has been explained and challenged by feminists for decades. It weaves together all sorts of specific, stereotyped traits -- women are too emotional, they talk too much, they're bad drivers, they nag, they shop too much, blah blah blah -- into an overall picture of what it means to be a woman, or to be feminine. Integral to this dominant notion of femininity is a sense that those who bear it are inferior. This, in turn, has a complicated but powerful relationship to the ways in which material circumstances (patriarchal social relations) actually do limit the space that women have (in different ways depending on other aspects of their experience) to exercise power over their own lives. Which isn't for a moment to suggest that women don't or can't exert agency -- it is to point to particular kinds of constraints in how agency can be exercised that are organized along gendered lines. And this dominant commonsense is both a product of these material circumstances, and a way in which these material circumstances are justified, legitimated, naturalized, organized, and reinforced.

The kind of humour in the article of course stays at the surface of this commonsense, and plays with some of the elements of it that have obtained iconic status in the patriarchal imagination. That is, the humour in the article both depends on and reinforces this dominant shared commonsense about what it means to be "A Real Woman."

The article's over-the-top presentation of these elements of patriarchal commonsense might in itself tempt some to argue that it doesn't need to be taken seriously -- kind of a derivation of the "the world isn't like that any more" argument. However, elements of this commonsense still organize in very powerful ways, if often with more subtlety than the article itself displays, assumptions by many people and institutions about what it means to fit in the category "woman." Even when it is less blatant, this commonsense is present in what many women experience from male partners, from co-workers and fellow community members of all genders, from employers, from institutions with which they must interact. There is plenty of writing and research, largely by feminists, showing that even if the form of all of this is less blatant than forty years ago, it is still there, still a serious problem. Yes, one small exercise in poor editorial judgment at an insignificant community newspaper -- I'm dubious about the claim on the front page that it has almost 100,000 readers per month -- is but a drop in the patriarchal bucket. But it still deserves to be challenged.

There are a few other things that defenders of the piece might raise. They might focus on intent, and say no harm was meant. Which is not really very relevant -- as you might have noticed, my post is written with the assumption that harm was not intended. What is at issue here is not intent, it is taking professional responsibility for the predictable impact that your published words will have. Other people might point to the fact that, judging by the masthead of South Side Story, the editor is a woman, as if that might somehow make the content okay. Again, I would point to the important part being the impact of these words, their relationship to a dominant cultural commonsense that is woven through the various ways that women are limited and harmed, not their source -- the intent and the gender of the writer and editor, like the plumage of the Norwegian Blue parrot in the famous sketch, "don't enter into it."

So, if you feel so inspired, particularly if you live in Sudbury but even if you don't, take a few moments to share your opinions of this piece with the editorial staff of South Side Story.

(Thanks to J.N. for bringing this to my attention. Any problems in how I've presented it are purely my own, of course!)

Review: Learning from the Ground Up

[Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, editors. Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010.]

This is one of those books that I kind of read by accident -- and I'm very glad I did.

I had a chance to have a look at it when one friend was lending it to another friend, and it just didn't grab my attention based on that quick inspection. I think I hastily lumped it into a particular category of books in which it does not really fit. Those books, which I used to read occasionally but haven't in some time, are collections of essays about social movements and other struggles from around the world that have lots of description, lots of dry 'facts,' and lots of a particular kind of analysis (usually straight-up political economy or conventional sociology, or something similar). Their authors probably identify them as being rooted in and contributing to struggles for social change but the way they are put together has always made them feel quite disconnected to me, and not terribly relevant to my own choices as I figure out how to act in the world.

I'm thankful that after he was done with it, one of those friends encouraged me again to give it a look. This allowed me to see that its resemblance to that class of past reads was superficial at best. Yes, it has essays on movements and struggles from around the world. However, its primary focus is not political economy but rather knowledge production as part of social movement struggles -- knowledge production by and within movements, not knowledge about or related to movements produced from without. This focus interests me for its own sake, because my own book project using interviews with activists as a starting point to get at histories of Canadian movements (and Canada itself) has forced me to think a lot about knowledge production that is grounded in and useful to social movements. However, I think this focus for Learning from the Ground Up also means that the essays it includes provide accounts of struggle that can be read by other activists in much more practically useful ways -- that is, that provide the appropriate information such that other people acting to change the world can read it and understand what was done, why it was done, and what it did, and derive lessons they can apply in their own situations. I found this to be true even for struggles happening in contexts radically unlike my own.

It's hard to say much else that applies to the collection as a whole, because the locations, the kinds of movements, and even the ways in which they talk about knowledge production are all so different. Some focus on the practices used in constituting a particular movement, such as the excellent article on the vibrant work in Toronto to promote the call from many civil society groups in Palestine for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel until the apartheid by that state is ended. Some focus more on knowledge production in the context of the conscientization of grassroots participants, as with the article about organizing among marriage migrants in Taiwan. Then there is one about popular, collective media creation, written about filmmaking as a tool for social change among Mi'kmaq and settler fishing communities in the Mi'kmaq Nation territory now called Nova Scotia. A particularly inspiring one for me was the essay on anti-privatization efforts by a militant trade union in Colombia, where knowledge production was both part of deliberate cultivation of a consciousness of solidarity among union members and members of the broader community, as well as a way of producing tools based on professional knowledge for strategic use by workers in the course of struggle. The look at critical worker education in Canada and the U.S. was also really good. And there were also interesting essays looking at the building of a collective analysis through reciprocal processes among taxi drivers and organizers in New York; at dynamics of silencing and unsilencing of migrants as part of oppression/struggle in South Africa; and, at knowledge production as part of struggles over notions of identity and assumptions about shared interest and solidarity by dalits and adivasis in India. And more. In most cases, the descriptions of struggle were rich and respectful, rather than flat or shaped purely in the service of proving some thesis or other.

Another benefit to me of reading this book was that it pushed my attention up to the global context in ways that doesn't happen often enough. So much of my own research, reading, and writing focus on what goes on within the bounds of the canadian state. I try to take an approach that is organized around hearing different experiences and analyses and trying to understand the social relations that connect them, and certainly a focus on the social relations connecting different people and groups of people within the canadian state can do a lot to push a person's analysis towards the roots of things. However, there is still something missing if you don't regularly touch base with analyses and experiences grounded elsewhere. And this book was a great way for me to do that.

So please give this book a read -- it is more closely connected to your own struggles than it might at first appear.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]