Feminist calls for better work for women, as important as they have been, have on the whole resulted in more work for women. Beyond the intensification of many forms of waged work… the burdens of unwaged domestic and caring work have also increased, both because of the pressures of neoliberal restructuring along with the double day, and because of the increasingly dominant model of intensive parenting presented as what is required to develop the communicative, cognitive, and creative capacities increasingly necessary for reproducing, let alone elevating, the class status of a new generation of workers (see Hays 1996). Given all the ways that the institution of the family — on which the privatization of reproductive labor has been predicated and sustained — is so clearly not up to the task of assuming so much of the responsibility for the care of children, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled, the refusal of the present organization of reproductive labor may have much to offer contemporary feminism.

[...]

Feminist antiwork critique would need to accomplish several things at once: to recognize unwaged domestic work as socially necessary labor, contest its inequitable distributon (the fact that gender, race, class, and nation affects who does more or less), and, at the same time, insist that valuing it more highly and distributing it more equitably is not enough — the organization of unwaged reproductive labor and its relationship with waged work must be entirely rethought. For feminist postwork imagination, it raises the following question: if we refuse both the institution of waged work and the model of the privatized family as the central organizing structures of production and reproduction, what might we want in their stead?

- Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, Duke University Press, 2001: 110-11.

Reading some of the passages below I began to realise how regularly I have been exposed to people’s concerns about this aspect of my relationship over the past couple of years. This makes me wonder whether my responses to such concerns have been performative or truly held statements about the kind of marriage I want. As students have been writing in their GCST2610 essays this month, this is the difference between ‘surface acting’ and ‘deep acting’ in Arlie Russell Hochschild’s framework of ‘managing feeling’. It has a lot to do with the pressure I feel to conform to others’ expectations of marriage in spite of my personal politics and situation. This book has some helpful points of clarification as I think about changing concepts of work, intimacy, presence and love.

Notes from Fairlee E. Winfield’s Commuter Marriage: Living Together, Apart, New York, Columbia University Press, 1985.

Two-career couples: ‘feel no need to choose between two very important aspects of their lives, a job and a relationship’ (4)

Both job and an intimate relationship are highly important. Commuter marriage is a new social structure for which there are no rules and few norms (4)

Types of commuter marriages:

- The Young Professionals
- The Relocatees
- The Well-Established: ‘both have important and possibly even prestigious careers in different cities when they wed, but they choose to continue their two-city lifestyle. Frequently the well-established are also “well-heeled,” famous, and highly visible’ (16)
- The Economically Motivated

Younger couples struggle with ascendancy conflicts; they wrestle with the dilemma of whose career should predominate (21)

The issue is not whether the wife shall have a career; the majority of male students in university classes and middle-class males in the work force now state that they expect their wives to work. The issue is whose career is more important (24)

The gaming approach of “we’ll take turns” is a hedge that allows retention of male self-image on two levels: first, the recovery of the traditional ascendency of the male breadwinner role; and second, the maintenance of pride in a more participative intimate relationship (24)

‘adjusting couples’ (Harriet Engel Gross 1980: 573): ‘have not had the time nor the shared experiences that contribute to a sense of “we-ness.” They lack the emotional reservoirs of an enduring long-term marriage. Second, as new, struggling professionals, they have not yet confirmed their professional competence. They still lack the ego and strength of their older counterparts (25)

The negative pressures from friends, colleagues, and relatives who question their living apart can be neutralized by seeking friendships with singles and other commuter couples (25)

Three things seem to make coping easier for the older couples: (1) the solidity of their relationship, (2) the faith that they can endure the demands of living apart, and (3) the recognition that they are compensating for the wife’s past efforts on the husband’s behalf (28)

The ‘pseudo-divorce’ category is generalized to all commuters and prevents societal changes that would genuinely make two engrossing jobs, two residences, and a rewarding relationship less bizarre (28-9)

“Syndromes” affecting commuter couples

- The Supermom, Superdad, Supersuccess Syndrome (“role overload”): women tend to feel responsible for everything – practical and emotional (29). This depends on whether they aspire to both a high standard of domestic living and a high standard of career achievement (30)

- Fatigue Fallout Syndrome: physical exhaustion; emphasis on good health; problem of stamina commuting requires (31)
“You do run out of steam. We’re amazed sometimes that we have survived until the holidays.” Not everyone makes it. They are simply too tired. But only a few considered that the drain on physical energy incurred by frequent travelling is a major issue. The commitment to work, especially for established couples, is so well fixed that dropping out seems unthinkable (33)
Commuter couples aren’t the only ones who fact the “intermittent husband and wife syndrome.” Military, diplomatic, truck driver, and oil rig wives, to name only a few, have all reported that they feel more relaxed when their husbands are away once they have become accustomed to getting along on their own. Adjusting to widowhood or divorce has received a great deal of attention from psychiatrists, but adjusting to a returning husband or more recently a returning wife is just now beginning to be investigated.
Symptoms include weeping, headaches, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity… early psychiatrist studies classified these as neurotic responses (34)

- Identity Syndrome: internally generated conflicts about whether one is a ‘good’ husband/wife/person…(35) arising ‘from cultural ideas of work and family as intrinsically masculine and feminine’ (36)
Lacking a new model, the exotic two-city family compares itself with “real’ marriage (people live together)… there is limit beyond which experimentation seems unable to go without damaging the male or female sense of self-esteem (36)

- The Motivational Syndrome: Why am I doing it?
→ alone at the top syndrome: both partners need a “wife” (41)

Married singles are expected to be promiscuous, and because of this expectation they are frequently subjected to sexual harassment. Peers, friends, co-workers, an employers look at the partners in commuter marriages as footloose, fancy free, and ready-to-play. They assume that the commuter is “separated” or getting a divorce, that no serious relationship exists simply because the couple is not living together as convention requires. Married singles are seen at best as “available” and at worst as rakes and wantons (46)

Most of the commuter couples tend to rule out sexual jealousy because such doubts are too much to cope with in a busy two-city marriage. They feel that extramarital relations are likely to cause serious strains on their present relationships. Sexual permissiveness is not a natural outgrowth of untraditional marriage (47)

Researchers insist that commuters do not have any more affairs than stay-at-home couples. So much concentration is poured into work and marriage that there is little energy left over for it. Obviously, women who were once upon a time limited to the milkman or the golf instructor now have the same opportunities for misbehavior as the men have had all along, but fatigue can put restrictions on extramarital affairs (49)

Dual-residence relationships don’t have more sex but the people involved enjoy sex more. Couples are generally highly monogamous and devoted to their sexual partners… Social problems, obstacles to privacy, and financial difficulties of commuter marriage at the lower income levels can diminish the “honeymoon” aspects. However, the couples who can use their imaginations in detailed planning of their “prime time” together have an advantage regardless of income level. It is really the care taken in shared time that is the important factor, and commuters seem to take more care because time is so precious (60)

The two-city marriage breaks a rigid moral commitment to the traditional family. Because this new social structure demonstrates that the major concern in our culture is not the family, nor intimacy, but work, it breaks very powerful taboos (63)

Couples who live together, apart, resort to the strategy of insisting that they are “only doing this temporarily” (77)

The required behaviour, at least for the moment, is that a couple live together. If you can’t do that because of a career considerations, you must at the very least say that you would like to do it. That is the ideal (77)

Commuter couples have almost no time for mutual friends, but their support system can more easily develop through encouraging separate circles of friends in the two locations where they live (84)

Overall, commuting couples report fewer social contacts because of their ambiguous social status, but they seem to be only slightly disturbed by this… “we each have a few devoted friends in our separate cities. That and our relationship is enough” (85)

It is estimated that half of the commuter marriages are in the academic world where work schedules are flexible and jobs are very scarce. But the number is growing in business, politics, journalism, publishing, and show business (166)

Couples who live together full time frequently seek leisure activities with outsiders – as a type of release from overdoses of intimacy in a marriage. Commuters, on the other hand, continue their leisure activities together (168)

Solitude in itself doesn’t produce loneliness, it comes when expectations fail (170)

[...]

It may be that the lingering spectre of rural social conservatism – however fair or unfair this stereotype may be – still limits the opportunity to engage critically with the present-day cultural experiences of rural Australians. But there is a more sympathetic view which we can take of the national deficit in rural cultural research, which is that the current structure of our research institutions, and the everyday realities of our lives as researchers working mostly in cities, makes rural cultural research genuinely challenging to undertake.

[...]

Young media users in country towns are now part of national and global social networks, rather than confined to the subcultures that happen to exist in town; previously isolated rural parents can seek advice and community over the internet; and traditional business owners or even self-employed treechanging cultural workers are able to meet their clients and pay their bills flexibly from a wider range of different locations. There are still very significant limitations and disruptions to the standard of media services in non-metropolitan places, but it is nevertheless the case that the horizon of social relations and cultural experiences in small country towns has changed.

[...]

Keyan Tomaselli likens cultural studies to a 4WD which is engineered for tough off-road conditions but never leaves the suburbs (2001: 311). This has some resonance for those of us concerned that the cultural research disciplines can look like a fleet of metropolitan hire cars available for the occasional return trip to the country-vehicles which proclaim when parked at farms and on country town streets that the drivers are passing through, and ‘not from around here’. But by asking the difficult questions about institutional power, and engaging in a more direct way with the research expertise outside the academy, we can begin to adopt more sensitive and sustainable practices.

Kate Bowles, ‘Rural Cultural Research: Notes from a Small Country Town’ Australian Humanities Review, November 2008

Dream large of narcotising the practice of thought, of putting to sleep the old cultures of criticism, inquiry and analysis, in favour of a consumer opportunity. Culture becomes brand. Dream large of how to educate and polish up your young people, so that they think efficiently but within certain limits, and so that they never engage their passion and pain as sites of intellectual activity, or as sources of intellectual energy. Perfect stainless‐steel‐coated technocrats, taking care of their affects through sex and drugs. And otherwise, trained to be accomplished but docile consumers; much like the education of previous generations of upperclass young ladies to grace the drawing rooms of power without challenging them.

The faculty of arts become a finishing school in the decorative liberal arts? Graduates knowing ‘just enough to use the trope’, as an American cultural theorist has said, speaking of the death drive? The university become a place for te destruction of thinkers? And collegiality now amounting to little more than averting one’s eyes while some of our number peck more vulnerable members to death? Such a form of thought is paranoid, a nightmare.

Look to the dawn.

- Robyn Ferrell, ‘Income Outcome: Life in the Corporate University’

Those of you who know Kane will already be aware of his local and international influence in the sociology of health. His new work is adopting cultural theory in fascinating ways, moving deftly between popular culture, critical theory, and embodied practice to address pressing issues for gay men. This is a really welcome addition to the list of cultural studies scholars already experimenting with the publics available for their work online. That it accords with the porous, mobile, ambient dimensions of the research object being analysed is terrific too.

This happy development has prompted some thinking on the changing nature of blogging. It comes alongside a fabulous PhD thesis I’ve been reading on feminist bloggers in Australia – which, incidentally, is the first example I’ve seen that’s able to demonstrate the political significance of affect and emotion in feminist blogging communities specifically. I’m looking forward to seeing more of Frances Shaw’s work after the momentous achievement of submission, particularly as a riposte to some of the established modes of representing so-called political blogging in this country!

I’ve also been thinking about the reports for my current ARC Future Fellowship application which, when they mentioned my blog, did so with enthusiasm – recognising that it has served a function for junior scholars over the years. This seems a notable development from the days when young academics were warned not to talk about their blogs in professional settings for fear of the perceptions that might be triggered – of time-wasting, on the one hand; or too much self-promotion, on the other. Oh how we debated these matters! I remember long, anxious discussions of what it all meant for the profession, in places like csaa-forum… though I can’t locate them now. Maybe it was at MACS. The ephemerality of such topical fixations is surely the point.

I wonder, then, whether Mark Zuckerberg is on to something when he says – in the otherwise alarming quote:

people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

Have perceptions towards blogging changed over time to recognise it as a legitimate supplement to traditional academic research and output? Certainly others have been discussing this at length recently. Far from being a threat to scholarly integrity, we may be seeing a new kind of default logic attached to the practice for universities desperate to retain a claim on public attention in the wake of the social web.

I’ve been saying for some time now that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have normalised and democratised blogging’s ‘broadcast impulse’. Today we are in a much better position to assess whether bloggers were always self-promoting careerists or perhaps searching for something else entirely from writing, scholarship and online community.

Regardless of these wider issues, I hope Kane’s blogging experience is as rewarding and sustaining as mine has been. Enjoy!

As students take on more and more loans to fund their education, their education changes form. Anyone who teaches at a University is perhaps aware of the chilling effect that student debt has an intellectual inquiry and education. Students do not ask themselves the questions: what interests me? And what discipline or field do I show talent for? But ask instead: what will get me a job? What will the market demand? Debt is the future acting on the present. The idea of future debt, of the cost of student loans, acts on the present, determining choices and limiting possibilities. Debt is mode of governmentality, a way to restrict and curtail actions; a mode that is all the more effective in being internalized.

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Student debt can be understood as a transformation of the educational experience and the university, one that uses the power of the state, taxation and the allocation of funds, to restructure the university from below. Indebted students, students desperately seeking wages adequate to their debt, are less likely to demand courses and programs engaging in critical thinking, let alone engage in the political activism that made the “student” a political transindividual individuation, defined by its liminal position between home and work, immaturity and maturity. Debt produces students who are desperately try to match their actions to the mercurial job market, rather than rethink society and their place within it. The politics of debt are produced from above, but the effects are felt from below in the daily actions of not only students, who ask only “how can this course get me a job,” but also an increasingly precarious adjunct teaching faculty forced to tailor their teaching to whatever can get them work. 

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It is very difficult to say “we” debtors, in the way one could say “we” citizens or “we” workers. Part of debt passes beneath us, in the calculations, quantifications, and aggregations that make up our digital self, our virtual identity, and is this respect we cannot even say “I.”

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debt is seen less as a collective condition, as part of a new regime of accumulation and a new governmentality, than as an individual fate.

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we should not spend too much time mourning the lack of the worker as an identity organizing Occupy Wall Street, or hold out hopes for unions to be revitalized. Such actions can only lead to reforms, to better wages and more work, and would return us to the division of worker and student, waged work and unpaid reproductive work.

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debt is dependent upon a new technological regime of surveillance and data sharing, is part of a political strategy of neoliberal governmentality, and perpetuates a subjectivity of isolation and anxiety. 

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Work, even the work at a given office, call center, or distribution site, is no longer that of a “we,” of a collective identity, but is individualized into temporary contracts, continual performance reviews, and dispersed incentives. To call this an “I” with all of its connotation of independence and autonomy, is not entirely accurate. As with debt the balance sheet of any one’s particular performance and hard work remains completely outside of their efforts.

==========

This is a situation in which any lateral connection, any connection with other workers, students, or even other customers of insurance, that is not networking, not oriented towards maximizing one’s potential is unnecessary or avoided. It is perhaps more accurately described as class decomposition than composition, as students and workers are isolated and fragmented into individuals and aggregates of fragmented bits of intelligence and knowledge. The identification is not between other individuals, any collective, but with capital itself, with the enterprise. The worker becomes an entrepreneur of the self, and the student an investor in one’s own human capital. It is perhaps in this sense that “corporate personhood” should be taken as issue: it is not that capitalism would be better if we could some how just return it to individual’s exploiting individuals, but capitalism functions by modeling a person that aligns his or her striving, with its functioning.

I love this last paragraph in particular. But it makes me wonder whether anyone would ever claim that this situation is true of their own actions. Do we need a more subtle language for our descriptions of these experiences? Or is the manifesto tone a necessary part of the genre? I am interested because it is a problem I have all the time with my own writing – and my own problems with writing are the reason I am doing a blog post right now rather than my conference paper for next week!

One of the many thoughts this piece prompted for me was a sense of the varied force and scale of the student debt problem in different national political cultures. If #occupy has effectively mobilised awareness of the debt issue in the US and in Europe, our government-led student loans system in Australia presents another front for analysis. The funding of universities here involves particularities that matter, even while our campuses reflect in practice some of the same tendencies shaping the experience of university life elsewhere (thanks again for these ideas, MFD).

What I suspect is even more important is the role our education system plays in the wider region of Asia, and how this does or doesn’t equate to the same kinds of imperial legacies of Anglo-American capitalism. We have already seen inklings of what an #occupy movement of international students would look like in the streets of Melbourne. Have these connections been made in the wave of more recent commentary? (Scholars like Brett Neilson have been writing about transformations in worker/student relations for some time.) Ultimately it is my parochialism, my lack of understanding of the routes our “international” students take to enrol in our courses, that makes me pause before disowning the traditions I am now implicated in perpetuating as faculty. Because who am I to know – how does my own employment situation even encourage me to know – what difference a Western education might make in a range of other countries? This seems to me one of the more crucial philosophical questions raised by these times.

I guess another way of saying all this is: where is Asia in the global economy, of knowledge and its debts, imagined by #occupy?

Everyone is welcome, and this week Elspeth Probyn will join us for the discussion along with some other department colleagues.

If you would like the readings emailed to you let me know – although most are already available online through academia.edu or other sources (tip: add “pdf” to a Google search…)

Don’t forget to register for our workshop and Sydney Ideas events on Friday, February 24… we need to be sure the rooms are the right size

Gordon Waitt and Kevin Markwell, “Touring the Sexualized City” in Gay Tourism: Culture and Context, Haworth Press, 2006: 159-202

Kane Race, “Party animals: the significance of drug practices in the materialisation of urban gay identity” Forthcoming in S. Fraser and D. Moore (eds.) The Drug Effect: Health, Crime and Society. Cambridge University Press

Will Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Scenes and Communities in Popular Music,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (October, 1991) 361-375.

Elspeth Probyn, “Glass Selves: Emotions, Subjectivity, and the Research Process” in S. Gallagher (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Self. Oxford UP. 2011.

Optional:

Guy Davidson,”‘Contagious Relations’: Simulation, Paranoia, and the Postmodern Condition in William Friedkin’s Cruising and Felice Picano’s The Lure.”  GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.1 (2005): 23-64.

Judith Halberstam, “What’s that smell? Queer temporalities and subcultural lives” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6,3 (2003): 313–333

Elspeth Probyn, “Only connect? Communicating across the coreperipheries of geography and discipline”. Address to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2011.

In her article, “Feminism’s Queer Theory,” Annamarie alerts us to the complex and apprehensive relationship shared between feminist and queer theory. The title of the article itself acknowledges the understated historical roots of queer theory as a development “alongside” feminism, as opposed to its Other. Starting her analysis from the “category of woman” problem, she progresses to the “controversial analytic separation of gender and sexuality,” in order to illustrate the “possibilities of queer feminist thought.” For Annamarie, such possibility arises through the recognition that “feminist theory and queer theory together have a stake in both desiring and articulating the complexities of the traffic between gender and sexuality.”

I agree with Annamarie’s argument. The relationship between gender and sexuality cannot be easily divided into two camps; both feminist theory and queer theory bring something unique to the table of identity politics and political projects. Something I am particularly interested in here is the relationship between academia and activism, especially in regards to queer theory. There seems to be a consistent dialogue between the women’s movement and feminist theory, which doesn’t seem to exist between the gay movement and queer theory. Due to the rise of ‘what Lisa Duggan has styled ‘homonormativity,’ theory and activism has become increasingly disjointed. Does this account for the “death of queer theory”? If anything, what has queer theory achieved? Should we do away with it? Does its resistance to definition hinder its ability to provide an adequate model for political action? How can a dialogue be opened between theory and activism? Is there anything feminism can teach its queer theory?

Annamarie’s article, “Counterfeit Pleasures,” examines fake orgasms as the means of socio-political transformation, as read through Foucault’s invocation of bodies and pleasures. Annamarie recognises that “one’s relation to the disciplinary system of sexuality is articulated with regard to historically specific and bounded sites of contestation.” She argues that fake orgasms are a “counterdisplinary discourse”—something that “does not necessarily feel good.” Rather than embracing the sexual practice as a site of socio-political transformation, she suggests that the fake orgasm opens up an “alternate way of thinking about the political, offering not a future-directed strategy for political transformation but an eloquent figure for political engagement with the conditions of the present.” By doing this, Annamarie joins the recent movement in queer studies toward temporality studies; affective relations in history. She advocates for the “importance of alternative political imaginaries for queer conceptualisations of erotic practice and identity.”

I really enjoyed reading this article. I thought it provided an interesting framework for thinking about the use of sexual practices as a means of political transformation. Whilst I think I follow the basic premise of her argument, I don’t quite grasp what she means by “alternative political imaginaries” for sexual practices, such as the fake orgasm—if someone can clarify? On another note, having just read Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, I can see a definite relationship between Annamarie’s and Jack’s engagement with the “unintelligible, the unproductive and the wasteful.” So, my question here relates to how such engagements with failure in Jack’s case, or the “counterdisciplinary,” can influence the ways we think about intimacy, and more broadly, politics of sex and identity?

In her chapter, ‘Sexual Orientations,’ Ahmed inquires “what it means to ‘orient’ oneself sexually toward some others and not other others.” Her phenomenological approach to sexual orientation presents a challenge to the normalisation of bodies as heterosexual. Through a reading of Freud, she suggests that “compulsory heterosexuality” carries on the family line, both literally and figuratively. She says “For something to be required is, of course, ‘evidence’ that it is not necessary or inevitable. Heterosexuality is compulsory precisely insofar as it is not prescribed by nature.” Thus, ultimately, compulsory heterosexuality fails. Compulsion directs objects towards lines of orientation—it “puts some objects and not others in reach”. New lines of direction are established when bodies make contact with the object that is not supposed be there (i.e. the “contingent lesbian”). Pulled by desire, a body leaves the heterosexual matrix and as a result, the body requires a reorientation through assembling other objects that are otherwise not visible or reachable in the field of heterosexuality. For Sara, the potentiality in this rejection of compulsory heterosexuality resides in its refusal to turn to face the hail of interpellation: “Having not turned around, who knows where we might turn. Not turning also affects what we can do. The contingency of lesbian desire makes things happen.” Thus, the lesbian looks to other lines of orientation, which inevitably affects the things she might do.

A challenging read. Theoretically, there is a lot going on in terms that Sara draws on many competing frameworks, such as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, feminist theory, and queer theory. I think phenomenology offers an interesting twist to the mix. It’s interesting in the sense that post-structuralism developed, partially, in reaction to phenomenological thought. Are we witnessing the “come back” of phenomenology into critical theory? I think one of the criticisms often directed at feminist theory and queer theory is its inability to address the real-life experiences of its subjects. Can a return to phenomenology help resolve some of these inadequacies?

To conclude, I think Annamarie and Sara are asking us, their readers, to rethink the ways we have thought about the intersections between sex, sexuality, and identity. Whether they state it, or not, both of them acknowledge the complexity of these intersections, which I think is one of the great things about working in the field: its heterogeneous terrain. There’s never a dull moment.

Jonathon is about to start Honours in Gender, Sexuality, and Culture at the ANU.

This week’s readings for Queer Thinking are as follows:

Melissa Hardie, “The Closet Remediated: Inside Lindsay Lohan,” Australian Humanities Review, May 2010.

(optional: “Beard,” in Rhetorical Bodies, eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999)

Lee Wallace, “Dorothy Arzner’s Wife: Heterosexual sets, homosexual scenes,” Screen 49:4 Winter 2008.

Kate Lilley, Ladylike, Salt Publishing, forthcoming. (Latest book of poems)

Kate Lilley, “Lesbian Professor,” Australian Feminist Studies, 11:23 1996

(optional: “Early Modern Garbo: the Two Bodies of Queen Christina” in Women Making Time, eds E. McMahon and B. Olubas Perth: UWA Press, 2006, 16-35)

I have copies of all of these to email anyone who would like to follow our thinking…