A Woman’s Work: Making Something Out of Nothing

Introduction to the Special Issue

Authors

  • Roxanne Douglas University of Exeter

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1232

Keywords:

World-Literature, Women, Workers, Social Reproduction, Labor, Labour

Abstract

This paper introduces this Special Issue of the Journal of World-Systems Research, “Women in World-Literature: A Woman’s Work” by making the case that the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC 2015: 9) conception of “combined and uneven development” can not only be applied to women’s writing in conversation with materialist feminist theory, but perhaps misses the ways in which women, Black feminists, indigenous lifeways, and queer world-making shows us a form of work that is not bound by the wage or value-exchange system, as many acts of care or favors often described as “women’s work”—cannot be repaid (Walton and Luker 2019). Missing from the WReC’s framework is an explicit engagement with women’s writing and how women contribute to, and are exploited by, the world-system. This Special Issue thus focuses on only one aspect of women’s engagement with the world-literary system: women’s work. From the labor market, motherhood, sex work, affective work, to knowledge production and storytelling, to the very work of consumption itself. Social reproduction theory and materialist feminists have made the case that capitalism relies on the invisible labor of women, particularly domestic work and community work. Yet, if we consider the creative dimensions of women’s work, do we discover gaps in world-systems frameworks which, when refracted through literary analysis, actually upset capitalism’s insistence upon the inevitability of exchange value? To exemplify this, I turn to Silvia Federici’s explanations of the witch as a tool to think about how we might “make something out of nothing.”

References

Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2017. “Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory.” Pp. 1–20 in Social reproduction theory: remapping class, recentering oppression, edited by T. Bhattacharya and L. Vogel. London: Pluto Press.

Bush, Kate. 1989. This Woman’s Work. Britain: EMI Group Limited.

Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40(4): 519. doi: 10.2307/3207893.

Center for Reproductive Rights. 2023. “The World’s Abortion Laws.” Center for Reproductive Rights. Retrieved 16 August 2023 (https://reproductiverights.org/maps/worlds-abortion-laws/).

Dalla Costa, Mariarosa. 1972. “Women and the Subversion of the Community.” Pp. 23–69 in THE POWER of WOMEN and the SUBVERSION of the COMMUNITY. The Falling Wall Press; The Commoner.

Dunaway, Wilma A. 2001. “The Double Register of History: Situating the Forgotten Woman and Her Household in Capitalist Commodity Chains.” Journal of World-Systems Research 7(1): 2–29. doi: https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2001.182.

Federici, Silvia. 1975. Wages against Housework. Bristol: Falling Wall Pr.

Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia.

hooks, bell. 2000. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. 2nd ed. London: Pluto Press.

Hughes, John, dir. 1988. She’s Having a Baby. Paramount Pictures.

ILGA Europe. 2023. 2023 Annual Review of the Human Rights Situation of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex People in United Kingdom Covering the Period of January to December 2022. Brussels, Belgium: ILGA Europe - the European Region of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association; the European Union.

Knopf, Kerstin. 2015. “The Turn Toward the Indigenous: Knowledge Systems and Practices in the Academy.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 60(2/3): 179–200.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. New York, New York: Penguin Books.

MacKinnon, Catherine A. 2023. “Exploring Transgender Law and Politics.” Signs Journal. Retrieved 19 August 2023 (https://signsjournal.org/exploring-transgender-law-and-politics/).

Minh-ha, Trinh T. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Moretti, Franco. 2014. “Conjectures on World Literature (2000) and More Conjectures (2003).” Pp. 159–79 in World Literature in Theory, edited by D. Damrosch. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Olufemi, Lola. 2020. Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power. London: Pluto Press.

Olufemi, Lola. 2021. Experiments in Imagining Otherwise. Maidstone: Hajar Press.

Rowbotham, Sheila. 2016. “Foreword.” in See red women’s workshop. London: Four Corners Books.

Stevenson, Prue, Susan Mackie, Anne Robinson, and Jess Baines. 2016. See Red Women’s Workshop. London: Four Corners Books.

Walton, Jo Lindsay, and Ed Luker, eds. 2019. “Introduction: Working Late.” Pp. 1–68 in Poetry and work: work in modern and contemporary Anglophone poetry, Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Watts, Carol. 1992. “Releasing Possibility into Form: Cultural Choice and the Woman Writer.” Pp. 83–102 in New feminist discourses: critical essays on theories and texts, edited by I. Armstrong. London: New York: Routledge.

Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.

Woolf, Virginia. 1994. A Room of One’s Own. London: Flamingo.

WReC, Warwick Research Collective. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool University Press.

Downloads

Published

2024-04-17

How to Cite

Douglas, R. (2024). A Woman’s Work: Making Something Out of Nothing: Introduction to the Special Issue . Journal of World-Systems Research, 30(1), 6–29. https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2024.1232

Issue

Vol. 30 No. 1 (2024): Special Issue on Women in World-Literature: A Woman’s Work

Section

Women in World-Literature: A Woman’s Work

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Roxanne Douglas

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
  2. Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
  3. The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
    1. Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
    with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
  4. The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  5. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
  6. Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
  7. The Author represents and warrants that:
    1. the Work is the Author’s original work;
    2. the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
    3. the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
    4. the Work has not previously been published;
    5. the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
    6. the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
  8. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.

Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link.