Also, on Friday 24th, Kane and I are organising an all day workshop, ‘Researching intimacy, sexuality and space’ at The University of Sydney. It will feature a series of speakers from Sydney and elsewhere, and finishes with a public forum with Sara and others debating “Why Gender Matters.”

Full details of the line-up will be available shortly. For now, I wanted to mention that in preparation for the Friday event we are running a weekly reading and discussion group that people here may wish to follow online or come along and join.

We’ve decided to group the discussions under three themes that relate to the Friday program and the drawcard speakers – Annamarie Jagose, Kate Lilley, Melissa Hardie, Lee Wallace, Kane Race, Elspeth Probyn and Sara. The readings will give a good sense of each speaker’s background and key ideas, and we will use the meetings to discuss how their work and the different lineages relate to each other – and to the field.

Here’s how it will look:

Week 1 – Sex (AMJ)
Week 2 – Style (KL, MH, LW)
Week 3 – Space (SA, KR, EP)

The themes are broad but from each we will get a chance to discuss 1) politics of queer/sex/identity 2) aesthetics and style – especially in cultural forms 3) theories of space, embodiment, belonging, scenes.

If you are interested in coming along to one or several of these we will meet on campus each week starting this Friday (3rd) at 3pm. Both Kane and I will be there and possibly other faculty depending on availability.

The following readings are the starting point for this week’s meeting:

Annamarie Jagose “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Feminism and Psychology 19.2 (2009): 157-74.
Annamarie Jagose “Couterfeit Pleasures: Fake Orgasm and Queer Agency,” Textual Practice 24.3 (2010): 517-39.
Sara Ahmed “Sexual Orientations” in Queer Phenomenology, Duke UP (2006).

Get in touch to find out more…

The first time we interviewed Jodi* she was enjoying working from home once every few weeks. These were days when Jodi was encouraged to think about the big picture, to be “less operational and more strategic”. A typical day at work for the telco involved wall-to-wall meetings: “you have half an hour break and then you run to another one, or you have one that goes all day”. So working from home was a chance to work on longer term projects without this sense of coercive presenteeism.

On her home days, Jodi claimed she would have her email open an extra hour at each end of the day, from 7.30 in the morning until 10.30 at night: “Just because I’m addicted to it and I have to see and respond to everything because often a lot of urgent things come up”. Even though she cherished working from home to get away from the office schedule, Jodi felt obliged to stay connected nonetheless. Putting an “out of office” reply on her email account sent the wrong message, she felt:

if you put an ‘Out of office’ on saying ‘I’m working from home today and not available on email’, then they’d be like ‘Well, how are you working?’ People don’t understand that you could just be working on a project when you need to just spread out and think.

Another reason Jodi monitored email around the clock was because on any given day it was the main source of directives from superiors asking for tight turnarounds.

Like this morning… I planned all this stuff I needed to get done today and then something came up this morning that needed to be done by close of business at 8, and it was going to take up quite a bit of time, so lucky I saw that email and responded to it and was able to manage it and get it done before close of business today.

Jodi’s use of email, which she calls an “addiction”, is actually a matter of having learned to prepare for perceived emergencies, and adapting to the communication preferences of more powerful colleagues in the organisation. With her managers so often in meetings, face-to-face contact was rare. Email was the one constant in a chaotic schedule.

Following our first interview Jodi’s role changed to include being placed on an on-call roster in addition to her regular duties. For 48 hours every fortnight, she had to be available for conference calls to deal with critical incidents affecting the company. Service faults and coverage issues were among the key problems. Our meeting transpired in the middle of this period:

I was on-call all day Sunday, Monday and today… I was on a teleconference last night until 7.30, and I was on one again at 8 a.m. on the train this morning, and I was going to go to the gym in my lunch hour and I got called to another business bridge, and these are just urgent things. We have 20 minutes notice that you have to hop on, and they’re critical incidents that are happening to our customers and we have to work out how to manage them.

Jodi was conscious of how this new requirement of her role was affecting her usual routine:

it’s really hard for me to have that work/life balance when I – like I was doing my conference call last night while doing the groceries and driving to the grocery store, and this morning trying to do it on the train with all these people around me who are not supposed to know this confidential customer incident. And then, you know, again trying to have some balance in your lunch hour with some gym, and that doesn’t ever happen. I’ve had a membership for six months now and I’ve gone maybe for the first two months, and then I had it scheduled today to go and then a bridge was called in the middle of it. So I couldn’t go.

The urgency and unpredictability involved in Jodi’s new job obligations made it difficult for her to make the simplest of plans. Her efforts to place limits on work’s invasiveness sound like a series of traps or enclosures, as work follows her every turn once she leaves the office. Not knowing when work would be required while she was on call also affected her home life.

I had to keep my mobile on last night because they told me at the 8.30 bridge they were going to call one at 6 o’clock in the morning. So normally I would have my phone on silent and only turn it on when I woke up, but because I knew this one was coming, I had to have my phone on so that – I didn’t sleep very well, actually, and I had this by my bedside and I was just thinking about this stuff I had at work and I had to get up, about 3 o’clock in the morning, and write down the things that were running through my head that I had to do for work because my head was racing with all the stuff I have to do and I couldn’t relax until I’d written it down and my mind could forget about it.

To make matters worse, this on-call extension to Jodi’s job was unpaid. It was a mandatory add-on for an indefinite time, justified by the fact that the telco she worked for was going through “a five-year transformation period”.

We’re migrating our customers from one platform to another and things happen all the time, like ten a day, incidences of things going wrong. So one example this morning was 100 per cent of our systems were freezing and they couldn’t do any transactions at all, at all. So whenever a customer comes in: ‘Sorry, can’t help you; system frozen’. We had to develop a work-around and some comms for our staff to be able to tell customers what to say in the situation.

Jodi acknowledged that these improvements to the company were unavoidable:

The annoying thing is like it’s not something that you’d ever get recognition for or not something you’re going to make the business money; it’s just something that has to be done and we just have to do it as part of our job.

Even though she hated the extension to her role, Jodi modulated her frustration by saying: “my manager’s also on-call, so she understands what it’s like, so that’s something”. But her manager, Holly, was paid a higher salary for this level of responsibility. By contrast, Jodi had simply been told: “Someone has to do it and you’re the one that’s skilled to do it”. Like the technology she was using to stay in touch with work, Jodi’s job had become subject to function creep.

Jodi’s relatively junior position gave her few choices. While she would be entitled to time off in lieu, she seemed unlikely to claim back the hours. Too much individual complaint would look like trouble-making in this team-based workplace: “I haven’t heard of anyone asking for it. I think if I did ask, my manager would probably say ‘Well I’m doing it and I haven’t asked for it’, so I don’t think so”. Within a few months it became clear that the five-year “transformation period” for the company also involved offloading 800 workers across the country. Jodi’s manager was one of the redundancies, and most of the team was wiped out entirely.

Jodi’s story gives us clear evidence of the impact of the iPhone on the 8 hour day. Most obviously, online technology changes our sense of availability when it comes to job commitments. Work can invade spaces and times that were once protected from its reach. This is a process we might describe the presence bleed of contemporary working life, where firm boundaries between personal and professional identities slowly dissolve – and when work becomes so intimate that it carries in to the grocery shopping, even sleep.

Presence bleed explains the now familiar experience whereby the location and time of work become secondary considerations faced with a “to do” list that seems forever out of control. It captures the sense of responsibility workers feel in making themselves willing to work beyond paid hours, and the anxiety that can arise in jobs that involve a never-ending schedule of tasks that must be fulfilled – especially since there are not enough workers to carry the load. Checking email, monitoring phones and maintaining online awareness are the inevitable outcomes when technology design has meant that our office is now in our phone. And when the phone is always within reach – in your pocket, by the bed – how can you claim to be unavailable for work contact?

As the office has become virtual, work is no longer a noun, a physical space for labour to be contained. It is instead a verb: a practice that takes place wherever it seems most convenient. The challenge for labour politics today is that a growing number of us exist in workplaces no longer governed by “clock time” but by an unpredictable schedule of rolling “events” – and transformation periods that never end because managers stay employed by enacting them.

What Jodi’s story also tells us is technology plays a role in naturalising and disguising this additional, unmeasured and therefore unacknowledged labour. How many of us regularly check email on a mobile device, at random times of the day, because it is “convenient” to do so – or because email doesn’t “count” as work? And how many people today realistically have a job where answering email isn’t expected as part of the daily requirements? In my study, people would regularly get up at dawn, before the rest of the house woke up, to get on top of email before going to the office to do “real work”. Others, especially mums, would wait until late night, the dinner cooked and the kids asleep, to “catch up” on work. These are the dawn raids and midnight attacks in the ongoing war on email. And like the war on drugs, it is a war that can’t be won. By its very design, network technology delivers more information than it is humanly possible to process – so why do we think that tomorrow morning will be any different?

In the guise of “convenience”, the iPhone has helped to ensure that there is no excuse for workers not to be on top of information, up to speed, and ready to answer the call. The irony is that managers regularly see these devices as key to better workforce productivity. Now, I grew up on a farm. My first workplace was my dad’s shearing shed. People in this audience will know that shearers fought for a workplace with the clearest 8 hour day you can imagine: 4 x 2 hour shifts, with smoko and a lunch break in between. In the work worlds I live and study today, people are sleeping with their phones, and checking email over breakfast. Is this the kind of life that a relatively wealthy country gives rise to? What room does it leave for social participation beyond paid work? If we are moving to a knowledge economy, as ALP leaders regularly tell us, it is time we came up with a new language to put limits on these seemingly inescapable labours.

*Not her real name.

In Australia a couple of excerpts have been published online if you are after a peek. At Inside Story, “Home Offices and Remote Parents” comes from chapter seven of the book. This is the chapter that lots of readers seem to react to, as it contains some of the most troubling stories of working parents with signs of chronic connectivity. Thanks to Peter Browne for his efforts putting this together.

Over at The Conversation, the piece I intended to write was sidelined with the news of Steve Jobs’ passing. As it happens, Jobs has a significant place in the concluding arguments for the book, so I decided to share some of them here. Thanks to Pat McGrath for that opportunity.

There have been some great radio experiences I have been lucky to have over the past little while, too, which I just wanted to store here for posterity. Thanks to Steve Austin and Richard Glover for having me on their programs as well.

The string of events that have unfolded since the book’s release – which also now include Occupy Wall Street – makes me realise how much more I would like to say about work and intimacy in future. For the moment, though, I want to announce the launch party for the book in Sydney in a few weeks. Everyone is welcome. The details are here and below. Come if you can!

Date: Thursday November 17th 6.00 for a 6.30pm

Place: The Beauchamp Hotel – Terrace Bar – 1st Floor
Corner of Oxford & South Dowling Sts, Darlinghurst, Sydney

To be launched by Annabel Crabb, the ABC’s chief political online writer and presenter of The Drum

RSVPs advised by November 15th to Simon Spivak at sspivak@wiley.com

Affective Labor and its Limitations.

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of feminist writings on the question of labour that clearly inform both the Italian tradition lately dominant (eg in the work of Hardt & Negri, Lazzarato), the fan tradition of affective labour highlighted by Henry Jenkins, among others, and a new wave of research investigating the forms of emotion work (Hochschild) that professional life involves. This context will be used to question whether current discussions of affective labour succeed in overcoming the problematic gendered assumptions at its heart, or indeed meet the challenges of measuring labour in a digital, biopolitical era (Clough).

The uniqueness of digital affective labour in its typically mediated forms will be shown to lie in its anticipatory, prospective dimensions. These provide an extremely effective disciplinary regime for corporate capital: in the networked office, workers perform professionalism online and off, as so-called social networking becomes a mandatory measure of employability (Boltanski & Chiapello). The accompanying shifts in public and private sphere narratives imagined by nominally white-collar professionals seem to require a labour politics organised around “event” as opposed to “clock” time (Adkins). But for to be appropriate to the present global division of labour, such political endeavours must also find ways to revive an effective language of materiality.

The lecture will build on the paper (rant?) I gave at The New School in 2009 and some of the discussions that took place during the Technologies of Gender and Labour roundtable last December. I am really keen to use the occasion to think about different feminist legacies from the 70s, 80s and 90s and would love to hear from anyone with thoughts on gender and labour as I put it all together.

The other exciting news is that there will be a US launch for The Affect Theory Reader at Bluestockings Bookstore on March 31. Greg and I will be talking and Patricia Clough will also join us on the night. Yay NYC!

Department of Gender and Cultural Studies 2011 seminar series

MONEY IS TIME: TEMPORALISATION, ECONOMIC CRISIS and BOURDIEU

Professor Lisa Adkins, University of Newcastle

This paper considers events related to the recent global financial crisis from the point of view of temporality. More specifically, it will elaborate how such events were entangled in a shift in the relationship between time and money, one where in deregulated financial markets money became time. This latter allows a problematisation of the normative view that the global financial crisis concerned a simple commodification or colonization of pre-existing futures. Instead I argue that practices and activities of financial traders, as well as governments and consumers, should be understood as concerning a shift in time itself. I will show that the social theory of Bourdieu offers some surprising resources for the elaboration of this time.

Date: Friday 11 March 2011
Time: 14:00 – 16:00
Location: The Refectory, Main Quadrangle (downstairs from the Faculty of Arts)
Street: University Drive, University of Sydney

All welcome. Drinks will follow at Manning Bar.

Contact: Fiona Allon (fiona.allon@sydney.edu.au) or Natalya Lusty (natalya.lusty@sydney.edu.au)

Thanks to Sen Raj for the cute pic.

Thanks to everyone who came out to welcome Lauren Berlant on her visit to Sydney last weekend. It was an incredible paper, and we are all in the department basking in the afterglow of a fantastically inspiring visit.

I also wanted to say sorry to those who couldn’t make it in to Saturday’s lecture – which sold out. While it’s disappointing that people were turned away, this also sends a strong message to New Mardi Gras that there is an appetite for this kind of Queer Thinking in Sydney. We hope the program (and our involvement) will continue in future. If you hope so too, let them know – there is a feedback form in the “About Us” menu of the NMG website.

For now, big congratulations to all of those involved in Saturday’s great program – and happy Mardi Gras everyone.

Next month the Sexuality & Space group will be sponsoring a couple of sessions at the Queer Thinking event at the Seymour Centre, including:

Lauren Berlant, “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin”

Downstairs Theatre, Seymour Centre, Sydney
February 19, 4pm

“Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin” reads with Heim’s and Araki’s work to think about a cultural style of underperformed emotion that’s post-melodramatic. It looks at contexts such as 20th century avant-gardes, trauma publics, punk/gothnegativity, LGBT and working class sexual cultural styles, comic deadpan, and other modes in which affective activity appears as inexpressive form, providing a holding space of delayed response to the urgencies of the moment.

Lauren Berlant is George L. Pullman Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of several books and essays that have had a galvanizing effect on the field of queer studies, including The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1997), The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke University Press, 2008) and editor of “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry (Winter 1998).

Head here to book, or for more details about Queer Thinking.

Hope to see many of you there! Especially because I think I have to do the intro…

Many scholars have noted that a gendered division of labour was foundational to the social contract of modernity (see Adkins, 2008; Pateman 1988). In the 1970s and 80s feminist discussions of technology responded to a critical landscape dominated by Marxist theories of labour (eg Barrett 1980). A key point of agitation was the separation of work and home space according to gender. Technology figured in discussions of women’s potential emancipation from home-based labour (Cowan 1983) just as it was shown to mark their differential treatment and position in the paid workplace (Game & Pringle 1983; Probert & Wilson 1993). Such studies rarely crossed the borders of specific national contexts, although the work of Wajcman (1991) marked a highpoint in debates about feminism, technology and work.

The impasse that resulted from the exhaustive “separate spheres” debates in Marxist feminism was exacerbated by a bifurcation of production and consumption studies in media and cultural studies throughout the 1990s. A growing literature on the domestication of technology revealed gendered dimensions to the everyday practices of television consumption (Morley 1986), telephone (Moyal 1984; Rakow 1992) and computer use (Lally 2002). Women’s affective labour in the home – maintaining family and friendship networks – was rarely quantified in the measures of mainstream economics (Fortunati 1995; Huws 2003). Accounts of gender and technology were typically confined to medium-specific studies or the macro frameworks of sociology and organizational studies. Science and technology studies developed the most sophisticated register for theories of labour informed by poststrucuturalist writers (eg Haraway 1991) and the subjectivity regimes of neoliberalism (see Cooper 2008; Cooper & Waldby 2009). If disciplinary distinctions have kept these conversations isolated, together they reveal how women’s exclusion from paid work and differential access to technology in private and public spheres have been structuring influences on widely held notions of modernity. This is a major focus of the workshop.

It is significant that the debates about gender and labour theory stalled at the same moment that the advocacy capacities of unions also failed to adapt to a white collar demographic implementing the shift to an “information” or “network” society (Castells 1996). As women entered the workforce in growing numbers, and organisations aspired to create so-called “flexible” solutions to suit their needs, the weaknesses of previous models for industrial representation became apparent. This roundtable will intervene in these established narratives of work, technology and gender. It brings together participants who inherit these debates in different disciplinary and professional settings, divisions that currently impede collaborative research in this area.

The international makeup of the roundtable and the qualitative studies presented will offer contrasting experiences of technology use in relation to gender. The case studies will also stand as models to discuss more encompassing definitions for labour in high-tech digital economies. Research into women’s assembly line factory labour (Hossfield 2001; Pun 2005) shows how manufacturing is increasingly structured by gender and race (see also Qiu 2009). Opening up this line of analysis the workshop interrogates the representative weight of Fordism in diagnoses of modernity (Mitropoulos 2006; Neilson & Rossiter 2008).

For instance, presentations will describe how women in low-wage regions are engaged in new forms of “clinical labour” (Cooper & Waldby 2009) such as cell harvesting and surrogacy. Here, gender and geography conspire to make highly constrained choices for women to participate in an international market. The lack of mobility and flexibility characterizing these examples contrasts with the workshop’s focus on the workplaces of creative and new media industries in the West, where the freedoms assumed of youthful employees are constitutive of the “precarious” experience of work in creative industries (Gill & Pratt 2009). Discussion of information work will assess the decline in security and entitlements in professional jobs and how this is especially relevant to women (Zuboff 1984; Andresky-Fraser 2001; Mosco & McKercher 2008; Gregg 2011). In a postfeminist context (McRobbie 2004), workers experience gendered inequality in portfolio careers in television, film, web and gaming industries (Deuze 2007; Gill 2007; Caldwell 2008; Kennedy 2010). Material presented at the roundtable will evaluate recent policy infatuation with the creative class thesis (Florida 2002) and the how this continues to inform planning and hiring practices.

A focus on gender and technology studies in the Asia-Pacific will question crude representations of the global economy according to region (North/South, BRIC, etc). Initiatives aimed at improving women’s access to technology in Malaysia and India will be compared with accounts of highly connected cities of Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong. In these sites, the uptake of mobile media platforms will be shown to confuse the categories of labour, leisure and play. The workshop observes how industry is responding to the challenge of marketing technology on this global scale, and how cultural research is used to influence such decisions.

Two decades after the publication of Wajcman’s Feminism Confronts Technology, this workshop assembles a dynamic group of international experts to advance opportunities for research that unite the themes of gender, labour and work. It develops a critical vocabulary for such studies that resolves the conceptual impasse inherited from an earlier period of modernity characterized by (male) factory labour. Current scholarship on mobile, wireless and ambient platforms will be used to improve existing theories of labour and the experience of modernity they often signify.

The project’s significance is to assemble a strong international research network to understand and overcome an international chain of dependence on women’s labour (Ehrenreich & Hochschild 2004). It invites longstanding advocates of humanities and creative arts methodologies working at the interface between anthropology, ethnography and design to engage with emerging scholars in media, gender and cultural studies. Pinpointing the gendered and geographical divides that mark our present modernity, the researchers will establish a network of collaboration that overcomes the “separate spheres” of labour research in a global knowledge economy.

References
Adkins, L. 2008. ‘From Retroactivation to Futurity: The End of the Sexual Contract’ Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research. 16(3): 182-201.
Andresky-Fraser, J. 2001. White Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America. WW Norton & Co.
Barrett, M. 1980. Women’s Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis. Verso.
Caldwell, J. 2008. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Duke University Press.
Castells, M. 1996. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Blackwell.
Cooper, M. 2008. Life As Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. University of Washington Press.
Cooper, M & Waldby, C. 2009. ‘Clinical Labour’. Seminar in the Department of Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney.
Cowan, R. 1983. More Work For Mother. Basic Books.
Deuze, M. 2007. MediaWork. Polity.
Ehrenreich, B. & Hochschild, A. R. 2004. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Metropolitan Books.
Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Basic Books.
Fortunati, L. 1995. The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital. Autonomedia.
Game, A. & Pringle, R. 1983. Gender at Work. George Allen & Unwin.
Gill, R. 2007. Technobohemians or the New Cybertariat? New Media Work in Amsterdam a Decade After the Web. Network Notebooks.
Gill, R. & Pratt, A. 2008. ‘In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work’ Theory, Culture & Society 25 (7-8): 1-30
Gregg, M. 2011. Work’s Intimacy. Polity.
Haraway, D. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge.
Hossfeld, K. 2001. ‘ “Their Logic Against Them”: Contradictions in Sex, Race, and Class in Silicon Valley’ in Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life. Nelson, A. & Linh N. Tu, T. with A. Headlam Hines. New York University Press: 34-63.
Huws, U. 2003. The Making of a Cybertariat. Monthly Review Press.
Kennedy, H. 2010. ‘Net Work: The Professionalisation of Web design’ Media, Culture and Society.
Lally, E. 2002. At Home with Computers. Berg.
McRobbie, A. 2004. ‘Post-feminism and Popular Culture’ Feminist Media Studies 4(3): 255-264.
Mitropoulos, A. 2006. ‘Precari-us?’ Mute Magazine. January 9. http://www.metamute.org/en/Precari-us
Morley, D. 1986. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure. Routledge.
Mosco, V. & McKercher, C. 2008. The Laboring of Communication: Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite? Lexington Books.
Moyal, A. 1984. Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Nelson.
Neilson, B. & Rossiter, N. 2008. ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’ Theory, Culture & Society 25 (7-8): 51-72
Pateman, C. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Polity.
Probert, B. & Wilson, B. 1993. Pink Collar Blues: Work, Gender and Technology. Melbourne University Press.
Pun, N. 2005. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Duke University Press.
Qiu, J. 2009. Working Class Network Society: Communication Technology and the Information Have-Less In Urban China. MIT Press.
Rakow, L. 1992. Gender On the Line: Women, the Telephone, And Community Life. University of Illinois Press.
Wajcman, J. 1991. Feminism Confronts Technology. Polity.
Zuboff, S. 1984. In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. Basic Books.

While the structure of the funding scheme means this is an invite-only event, there is room for just a couple of extra people to come along at this late stage. Do get in touch if you are interested.

In preparation for the event, we’ve been using a delicious tag “GLT” to assemble a list of references that speak to the workshop themes. Anyone is welcome to add their own suggestions to this list.

I’ve posted an overview of the project – taken straight from the grant application, for those of you wanting an insight into the genre – on a new research page. I’ll add more details and give an update on the outcomes from the event when I have a bit more time.