Ya,
en una guerra global permanente
Yo,
que vivo en guerra cotidianamente
Yo
salgo a las calles y digo que ĦNO!
(to strike in A
major, to the tune of ³Yo te amo con la fuerza de los mares²)
In the months that followed the ³Grand Show² of December of 2002, we began to give shape to what all of us understood as a second phase in our exploration of womenıs precarious work. Some moved to other places and no longer shared the day to day of Precarias in Madrid, others joined the group or proposed particular initiatives: the publication of a text in a book or a web page, participation in a conference, collaboration in a video, or else accompanied us in organizing processes or in a mobilization.[1] This coming and going makes room for a mode of networked cooperation which is not so much about belonging, in this case to the group of Precarias, as it is about opening a field of communication and fluid action - sometimes perhaps too diffuse - which we hope will become a means of constructing a new space of aggregation: the Laboratory of Women Workers.
Our comings and goings had already illuminated a series of problems, as much on the theoretical level the concept itself of precariousness, for example and on the methodological level how shall we approach each other? How, being sometimes so close and sometimes so far? as in the question of how to generate conflict in environments which are invisible, fragile, private or in environments which are more or less codified, such as the ones that opened up in the heat of the mobilizations during the invasion of Iraq[2] or in diffuse environments like shopping malls, department stores, public transportation, etc. We had important testimonies, many of them recorded and transcribed, and we had generated a series of tools, modest though they may be, such as the picket-survey, the Precarias mailing list, the accounts from the field and, in general, a practice of meticulous documentation with the intention of preserving and giving form to our reflections and our itineraries. The experiential knowledge that we proposed through the driftsı had set us on track and had permitted us to expand our point of view almost vertiginously. On the other hand, the consolidation of the network of contacts that had formed around the project of the drifts and the invitation to strike the proto- Laboratory of Women Workers was still in the bud, as were many of the utterances, slogans and hypotheses that we hoped to produce. A few important drifts, in particular that of media production and that of sex work still had not been undertaken for various reasons, and we did not want to leave them up in the air.
In January of 2003 we participated in the conference Pensar en Precario (³Thinking Precariously²) organized by the CGT[3] and we once again encountered other persons and collectives that, like us, had been thinking this question over for some time: how to think about and organize that which some had begun to call the precarious class (precariat?) or social precariousness.[4]
So we designed what would be this second phase and we spoke of giving continuity to this project in three different but not unrelated ways: (1) a second cycle of drifts, (2) a series of workshops of collective reflection open to more people and (3) some interventions that would allow us to investigate possible forms of conflict.
In some ways, the drifts had opened a thrilling contact, a form of contagion and reflection which we did not want to give up, a method which moreover had not yet borne all its fruit. An infinite method, given the intrinsic singularity of each route and its capacity to open and defamiliarize places.[5]
The workshops were a bid for a more leisurely encounter, as well as a means of reaffirming the relationships we were creating and a call to collective delirium, albeit planned. The workshops were born, in some way, from the contacts or necessities which had come up throughout the drifts: why are we talking about women? What is in question in this so-called crisis of care? Some of the workshops went rather quietly by, others, in particular the ³Workshops on Globalized Care² really worked and permitted us to delve deeper into a complex field such as that of the conditions in which reproduction is realized on a global scale. Last, the thorny question of conflict, riddled more by intuitions than anything else, was still there, irreverent, winking at us from the corner. Infiltration, (industrial?) espionage, transvestitism, the rebellion of the machines, faulty labeling[6] and, of course, the ³reclaim the streets² or the mobile surveying device all showed themselves to be pale hints of the possible.
The whole thing has, evidently, gotten more complicated as weıve gone along and weıve ended up involved in accompanying Hetaira[7] on its outings in the center of Madrid and in the Casa del Campo, in a series of self-interviews and dialogues with colleagues who we have run into along the way and, above all, in a publishing and audiovisual initiative which has centered our efforts in the last months of 2003 and which now is partially made flesh in the artifact you are holding in your hands.[8] Bon Appetit!
DRIFTS AND SOMETHING MORE THE SEX-WORK TANGLE
AGAIN?
The drifts, as we explained in ³First Stutterings²[9], are not limited to a route guided by a given experience of precariousness. They are neither a mere stroll nor a planned activity. Thus when we proposed approaching sex work we understood clearly that we could not just reproduce the role of ³gawkers², as one prostitute in the Casa del Campo called us, nor that of simple sympathizers. For this reason we were thinking more of an exchange that would go beyond the future sex work drift. At the moment, the exchange has taken the form of our participation in some of the activities of Hetaira[10], which has permitted us to approach street prostitution, a world unknown to us, and establish a link where there had been none. We hope that this link becomes closer over time and that it becomes a cooperation which might contribute to connecting this stigmatized and harassed sector of work to other precarious realities with which it occasionally overlaps.
But first, might we ask again why sex work? We already knew, either from first or second hand experience, about the polemics that surround prostitution: those within the feminist movement[11] and those that habitually come up in public speech, for example in the media, so prone to prohibitionism. The debate between abolitionists and the defenders of the rights of sex workers that -- for those who do not know -- have cost us great battles, schisms and much bad blood, seem to be at a dead end, and we are not going to be the ones to reproduce them here. Some activists and scholars that are working in this field, prostitutes or otherwise, affirm that they are tired of warring against positions which are too narrow, deterministic and victimizing, and of feeling alone against the renewed wave of criminalization that is upon us and which strikes, first and foremost those sectors of society which are traditionally the most persecuted and marginalized. The touchstone continues to be the rights of the workers, or in other words the recognition of this activity as work and therefore as generator of a series of rights (although these are in the process of being dismantled in almost all sectors) comparable to those which are acquired through other kinds of work, and not as violence or sexual slavery, as something over which no woman might have full power of decision, or as the epitome of patriarchal and capitalist domination.[12]
Traditionally this position has been defended, with various nuances, as much by bourgeois feminists as by socialist ones for whom prostitution was comparable to other unequal contracts which, like marriage, should be abolished, and whose abolishment was subordinate to socialist revolution. While many women affirm their right to prostitute themselves and to be considered ³like any other worker² a horizon which is in the best of cases fuzzy and shifting the arguments that try to inscribe prostitution (along with other social realities) in the patriarchal order lose centrality within a stagnant polemic.[13]
What the public consideration of sex work introduces is an argument phrased in moral terms. Prostitution, they say, threatens the dignity of women converting their bodies in an object of commerce (and violence).[14] Nevertheless, when the activity is consensual we find ourselves in front of a crime with no victim from which we donıt really know very well who to protectsociety? Public morals? Any considerations from the point of view of the professionals stays, within this perspective, quite out of the picture, and those who claim to be protecting end up victimizing.
On the other hand, the pragmatism that dominates regulationist discourse in which participate, in varying ways, prostitutes, businesspeople that run places of prostitution, and some feminist organizations limits them to consider the management of this activity, something that feminists allied to prostitutes years ago linked to a wider debate in which they included other questions which, over the years, have become less important. Among these were sexual senses and practices, their historical transformations and their strategic contribution to gender. This, which could be thought out very well from prostitution and the perspective of the prostitutes, not only concerned the women directly involved no small thing but all women. The rights of prostitutes the invention of new rights like the rights of domestic workers, have stayed in the margins of legality and, therefore, of state regulation,[15] and their visibility as subjects has had to situate itself in the center of the debate. Moreover, prostitution or sex work is a privileged location from which to speak about the value and the changing dimensions of sex in patriarchal society.
What is clear is that 1) today sex work is a strategy for earning an income greater than that earned in other activities which many women choose among other bad or limited options (especially in the case of immigrants) and 2) the only thing that prohibitionist and redemptive proposals have achieved is to undermine the opportunity of the women who perform these services to gain a position of strength, thus submitting them to extra pressure and contributing to their stigmatization and invisibility. The special sanitary and police controls, the segregation into particular parts of the city and the implantation of distinct levels of tolerance, obligatory registration, the penalization of pimps and clients and the fines for working in the street all augment this effect.
When they have been given a chance to speak, many prostitutes have affirmed their capacity to choose or at least their capacity to make a living in the manner which works best for them given the circumstances, and many agree that the worst of it is not the supposed indignity of the sexual exchange, for which they have developed adequate mechanisms of involvement (so adequate that, as Pateman observes, they deeply bother men who aspire to buy ³real² sex), but precisely the conditions under which they work and the way that they are treated for the work they do. This, as the testimonies of Mary-Loly indicate, is not new:
³Many times I could have left it but I never decided to. Why? Well, because I think that after so many years of moving around so freely, doing what you feel like, having money in your pocket with certain ease, its pretty hard to start working with a fixed schedule, with a boss that exploits you and a wage that never gets you decorously to the end of the month. I have seen it with some married women who turn a few once and a while to get some extra money which their husbands donıt bring home² (J.R. Saiz Viadero Conversations with Mary-Loly. Forty years of prostitution in Spain. Barcelona, Ediciones 29, 1976.)
As Cristina Garaizabal explains, ³If we donıt take into account the decisions that prostitutes make, if we victimize them thinking that they always work because they are forced to; if we consider that they are persons without capacity of decision all this means never breaking with the patriarchal idea that women are weak and helpless creatures in need of protection and tutelage.²[16]
ALTERNATIVE CIRCUITS
In any case and despite the state of the question in feminism, what is clear is that the scenario in which sex work is being debated is rapidly and profoundly changing, and that this should provoke a reopening of the dialogue in other terms. Here are a few more points towards that end.
The consumption of goods and services of a sexual nature has augmented and diversified.[17] On the other hand, they are progressively being accepted by women. As the professionals insist, the world of the sex industry is very diverse and in these moments its difficult to generalize. The places, the services, the regime and the working conditions vary and depend, as they do in other activities, upon the situation (in terms of residency documents, race, place of origin, sex, age, family situation, etc.) of the person in question.
Another significant fact is that Spanish prostitutes and prostitutes from Western Europe in general are being progressively substituted by immigrants from Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Sex work is a feminine survival strategy inseparably joined to present migrations, and together with other escapes such as marriage or sexual tourism it shapes the new circuits of globalization.[18] Sex work is a flexible kind of work which could be, and in some cases is, autonomously managed, unregulated and intermittent. In this sense, it is an opportunity for many people who find their access to a decent income and basic resources restricted on the one hand by the State (immigration laws) and on the other by the labor market. Nevertheless, this same flexible and alegal character of sex work may deepen not only the stigma but also the precariousness that weighs upon workers.
There is a restrictive interaction between immigration law and sex work which has the effect of blocking possibilities of regularization and encouraging extortions and pressures of all kinds - among them those that threaten sexual liberty and freedom of movement to which migrant women in sex work are exposed.
The trade in persons for sexual activities has increased, a trade that goes against the will of the women in question using extortion and violence and which, whether we like it or not, cohabits in many contexts with the free practice of prostitution.[19] It is important here to refine the distinction between (1) forced work (slavery), (2) debt-indentured work (partial slavery) (3) paid work (without debts related to migration) and (4) autonomousı work (more subject to self-organization of time, activity, place, etc.). We are aware that these categories or regimes require a development which is, in turn, extremely controversial.[20]
Another important element is the incipient organization of prostitutes in Spain, derived in part from the fact that many of them, Latin Americans, come from countries in which there are unions of love workersı as they are called there. An incipient organization has also been produced by brothel owners, motivated by their loss of profit to the competition in the street.
ADRIFT
With some of these reflections and transformations in mind we initiated our approach to sex work. In the summer of 2003 we joined Hetairaıs trips to the Casa del Campo[21] and the city center[22], we supported their mobilizations and planned a series of interviews and a first drift, in the beginning of November, which helped us to open the field of sex work erotic telephone lines, peep shows, brothels, etc.- and made a modest contribution to the work which Hetaira has been doing for years around street prostitution.
It must be said that these trips with Hetaira took place in an especially difficult moment due to recent neighborhood protests and the general securitarian attitude of politicians and the police, as well as the sensationalism sex, mafias, foreigners: what more could they ask for? of the press.[23] The accounts of the trips show the complexity of street prostitution as well as our own confusions and fantasies too morbid and exotic, too ingenuous and voluntaristic, too correct and useless tinted, in any case, with an imaginary of pleasure and danger.
Street prostitution gets ever more complicated. The organization of work is subject to the pressures of Mafiosi, gawkers, clients, police, neighbors and pimps.[24] Prices are dropping and are differential according to race, age and papers. Those that work the street represent the lowest level and, in many cases, the most dependent, most oppressed and persecuted.
Prostitution, like domestic work, does no less than demonstrate the sexual and racial differentials that exist in a given moment. But how do these mechanisms work? Why are the Sub Saharans the ³cheapest²? Why is the price of service dropping on the streets? Why is the demand and the price going up for Spanish girls? Why donıt they all go to the brothels to work? To respond to these questions we have to take into account phenomena on scales as different as new international and sexual division of labor, Spainıs immigration legislation and the policies to control migrant (and street) movements, the eroticization of hierarchy, racism and the complex mechanisms that are loosed when sex is sold as a service. The analysis of this crossroads is difficult but we think that now, more than ever, it is essential.
One of the elements of pleasure, says one colleague, is to feel oneself desired, and this disappears when we buy sex, although it can be substituted if we can imagine, somehow, that the prostitute chooses and chooses us, that she does it ³because she wants to² and not because ³she has no choice,² that there exists, in fact, some feeling.[25] When this whole hodgepodge is set loose we are again assaulted by the possibility of thinking about sex and the practices of sex in a historical dimension as do Foucault and the feminists that inspire us, that is, as production (and not as mere domination), as a place of regulation and of government. Thus we think about how sexuality has transformed in relation to femininity and masculinity, how sex services are specializing and becoming more sophisticated, and how all of this together with the invention of rights in a general context which is dominated by disarticulation and a particular one - that of sex work which is characterized by imbalance and stigma.[26]
In our feminist perspective, the exercise of prostitution reproduces a theatralization of power; the man negotiates and buys the right to access the body of the woman and to something more, something that canıt be separated from the other: a performance of sex with love, a normalized or an aberrant sexuality, equal or hierarchical, voluntary or forced, the compensation for a deficit of sex or affection, a companion, a mother, etc. Many kinds of performance can be bought, one need look no further than the advertisements in the newspaper. Prostitutes have always talked about how much their clients talk, their role as therapists or desired subjects, thus demystifying the generalization that would make violence or distain a guideline of sexual service. Fantasies of dominion, of war, of the inversion of power, of the secret and its unveiling as a client said on television: ³Nobody gives so much for so little.² Sex work, as we said before, is a strategic place to reveal the sexuality normal and deviant of a particular historical moment, as well as the way in which this is linked to other dimensions of social identity. Prostitutes and sex workers in general make explicit the performances of gender and the borders of being woman.
According to what some companions in this sector have told us[27], stratification depends in large measure upon the effect of reality or verisimilitude of the fiction, that is to say, the extent to which it approaches a non-mercantile sexual encounter. Some men like to think that the worker is not working, that she is into it and that she gives her body and soul, as they say. The fiction of the studentsı flatı used to advertise brothels, the fiction of the independent woman or hostess who receives or accompanies gentlemen in high level prostitution, the migrant clients who want to be with Spanish girls, the anonymity of brothels and erotic telephone party-lines are manifestations of this fiction of equality, of normalcy. Being white is another indicator of equality, distinct from the orientalism that women of other colors and origins offer, or the panorama of poverty and foreignness that is often intuited in the case of immigrant women. Cybersex is an interesting phenomenon in this sense, especially because of the dislocation of identity which the net and other interfaces like the telephone make possible.[28] The opportunity to disguise sex for money through telephone messages registered in an answering machine contributes to dematerialize the exchange and assure a performance that is less carnal but more open to simulation.
And so what does all this mean?
This is precisely what we would like to continue exploring. In any case, we donıt know if this tendency towards the ³dissolution² of the traces of asymmetry of sex, social origin, race, ethnicity, age, body standards and sexual identity is dominant. Evidently it coexists with others that value the fantasies of domination and submission or that are inspired in hierarchies of sex, race and origin.
What is clear is that these fantasies be they of equality or domination/submission are produced in the context of a social system that is hierarchalized in accord with certain axes, which we have tried in various ways to define. The resulting stratification takes into consideration (1) the work regime (coerced, indentured, paid without debts and autonomous); (2) social, labor and geographic mobility; (3) the degree of exposure of the body (direct in the case of prostitution, semi-direct in massage, or indirect in peep shows and telephone lines); and (4) the organization of work (in flexible and networked enterprises like the chatlines or the larger brothels, or familiar structures like those of some other brothels, autonomy as in the case of some prostitutes, mafia systems, etc.). If we cross these categories of position and regime we have a fairly complex map of axes.
This map then begins to show us some singularities and common grounds. It shows, for example, the similarity between certain kinds of sex work and other jobs in the field of communications, of commerce (in the big chain stores or in the small boutiques) or in domestic service (equally fragile in terms of legal status). We are speaking about very similar enterprises. With their advertising instruments, their systems of controllersı, their receptionists in the role of contact person, supervisor, presenter, disseminator and accountant, their decentralized installations, their flexible hours, their tendency to occupy all the living time of the workers (as in the case of internal domestic workers), etc. Although the social stigma is shared throughout the sector of the sex industry, it also has to do with the feminization of the activity, the invisibility and lack of esteem, features which sex work shares with other kinds of care and attention work.
Another dimension to be taken into account among the common grounds and singularities to be reinforced is the question of womenıs identities. As Laura Augustín has suggested, many do not think of themselves as prostitutesı or sex workersı but as women from this place or that place who ³happen to be working temporarily in the sex industry to achieve a given end. This means that they are less interested in questions of identity than in those that permit them to go on making money in the way they want, without harming or endangering them on the one hand, and without pitying them and trying to saveı them on the other²(forthcoming). This lack of definition or professional ambiguity, which we will also see among the telephone operators, is not here the product of deregulation but of the very condition of a jobı which is confused with the very nature of the bad woman.ı To this we attribute the expansive and diversifying character of the industry itself it is difficult to distinguish between some eroticı services and other sensualı activities considered part of health care, or others in the realm of art and/or entertainment and the entrance and exit flow of many women, especially migrants, who today look after children and tomorrow might do a week in the Casa de Campo.
Our notes, for the moment, are many and dispersed. The accounts and impressions which we have pulled together suggest more questions than answers. We have opened our ears during the trips with Hetaira, the interviews and a first drift with a friend who works in an erotic telephone line and another who is receptionist at a brothel, and we hope to continue opening them in the coming months. In any case, this seems to us a good point of departure in a moment which seemed at first so overdetermined by the impasse in feminist debates.
HOUSEWIVES, MAIDS, CLEANING LADIES AND CAREGIVERS IN GENERAL. THE WORKSHOP ON GLOBALIZED CARE.
TALKING ABOUT CRISIS
The reflections arising from this workshop are presented in a text included in this volume,[29] so we will procure that these pages serve just as a invitation to situate ourselves in the place where this investigation began, at a particular crossroads: Crisis? Conflict? Transit?
The Workshop on Globalized Care was held in three sessions. The participants were women each of whom was a mixture of some of these things: domestic workers and caregivers, migrants, scholars, activists, lawyers, social mediators, etc. The first session was an effort to approach the present panorama of care: social transformations, feminist positions, the role of migration and immigration law, the legislation of domestic work, the situation of the labor market. Then later we got to thinking about a caregiversı uprisingı, experiences which exist so far and others that could exist in the future.
The discussion, as always, got good and complicated because it is true that there are just too many things: (1) the history of the sexual division of labor and its present configuration; (2) the feminization of migratory flows and the passing along of inequalityı, (3) the legal framework which fixes the status of domestic work as subemployment and that of women as subalterns, (4) the content of this work: its temporal, spatial, subjective and other limits and (5) the fronts open for struggle.
To some extent our interest in globalized care is the same
as that which motivates the whole institutional topic of ³reconciliation of
work and family life,² although we depart from different premises and move
toward different conclusions.[30]
For the moment we are going to call this a ³crisis²: the mainstream
reproductive scheme presently comes into conflict on one side with the pressure
exerted by the deregulation of work (both masculine and feminine) and the lack
of public services and, on the other, with the expectations that access to
education, more or less stable employment, sexual self-determination and, in
general, feminismıs position on the liberation of women has generated since the
1970s.[31]
³With the rupture of the Fordist family model, in which the social infrastructure of home and care was resolved through the exclusive dedication of women to this free work, we find ourselves confronted with a new scenario and with it the rupture of the old structure of care in which deferred reciprocity guaranteed that those who were cared for in their childhood and youth would be in the future the caretakers of their elders.² (from S.del Río and A.Pérez Orozco, ³La economia desde el feminismo: trabajos y cuidados² Rescoldos, n.7, 2002.)
But let us go bit by bit. By hegemonic reproductive scheme we understand the nuclear patriarchal family with a strong sexual division of work which determines the division between the public and the private, production and reproduction; it is indubitably a white, middle class family, legitimate heir to the bourgeois family of the 19th century, and extended as a model (attention, as a model, not necessarily as an experience) to almost all other layers of society throughout the first half of the 20th century. This scheme maximizes biological and social reproduction, in Bourdieuıs sense, both that which has to do with the transmission of inheritance and that which has to do with the care of offspring in intimate collaboration with the State and with the maintenance of the moral order. In Francoist Spain, this model was colored by the special hue of an authoritarian welfare State[32], the moral and institutional predominance of the Catholic religion and the propaganda about women as ³angels of the home². The crisis of this model began in the PostFrancoist period and has become more acute in the last decades.[33] Crisisı here does not suggest that sexual division does not continue to be produced, that previously women of the lower class were not subjected to an intensive model of work outside and inside the home, that this model is deployed in the same ways in different contexts (for example in the rural context) or that the same things happen everywhere at the same time. The nuances are important, nevertheless it seems pertinent to us to speak of a hegemonic model and to clarify that when we talk about the sexual division of work we do not assume that women do not work outside of the house but we do see that reproduction ceases to take place primarily in the bosom of the extended family and that, from the 18th century onwards in Europe a series of collective services are established that, leaning upon the family and upon women, are oriented towards educating, pacifying and integrating the population and quiet the danger that in that period, and in others thereafter, the popular classes have represented.[34] We neednıt mention that this model has been object of successive crises and readaptations; for example, after the two World Wars.
One of the elements of the current crisis, deregulation, has to do on the one hand with the loss of masculine employment in the 1980s and, on the other, with the growing expansion, fragmentation and diversification of employment niches for women, no longer in administration or manufacture but in the service sector: cleaners, caretakers, servants, waitresses, shop keepers, telephone operators, advertisers, beauticians, sex workers, escorts, etc., a sector in which, as we know, work is ever more precarious.
The second aspect of this crisis, the absence of public service, has to do with the development of the so-called ³Mediterranean² welfare State, called Mediterraneanı because it sounds nicer than rudimentaryı or familyistı. This means that reproduction is in the hands of women, frequently in the double work-dayı regime, and that only in the absence of a woman will the State intervene. Services are, especially in the field of care, a complement to the action of women. Homes with resources will contract another woman, probably immigrant, to externalize part of this work. And this is where other dimensions enter into play, like immigration regulations: the fact, for example, that migration law rests upon discriminatory phenomena that are unjustifiable from any Euro-orthodox point of view such as the pre-assignation by law of certain jobs (domestic service) to certain population groups (foreign women) in function of their sex and their condition as aliens. If all those European declarations really held any water these phenomena would be considered attacks against human rights.
The third element, the generalization of feminism, forms part of the subjective horizon of Spanish women and constitutes a popular and populist tool in the hands of most parties and some brands. The acceptance of womenıs autonomy as an idea has been disseminated and individualized.[35] Despite this it bumps up against feelings of stress and difficulty when one undertakes independence (young people in their parentsı houses, married women unsatisfied with their husbands or women charged with dependents), maternity, education, equality in promotions or the division of work. Autonomy, despite its effects upon self-esteem, ends up being little more than an ideal towards which one can barely even tend, something for ³superwomen², something which may even be annoying to the extent that it is unreachable. To these aspects we must add another key factor: the aging of the population[36] which together with the falling birth rate is provoking a situation of uncertainty and, as the media say, of social alarm which in the coming years may modify or at least nuance the criminalizing discourses on immigration in favor of others which place more emphasis upon the profitable character of the migrants as a labor force, and even more dangerous, as a procreative force necessary in just proportions. Probably we will witness a combination of both orientations.
All these elements form
part of our debates, but in the last months something has changed in us. Perhaps its that weıre getting older or
that talking about these things in the first person reminds us that we too will
be caretakers and eventually, cared for.
Or not? To varying degrees some of us already care for the people we
live with, ourselves, and in a still rather lax way, members of our
families. Almost none of us have
children, nor could we. One of us
has them on the other side of the pond and manages one of her households from a
distance, with all the uncertainty which that represents. But, letıs see, what options do we
have? Many of us are mortified by
the thought of living with our families, even by the thought of having to care
for them; weıll see how our elders get along. We flee from emotional blackmail and affirm our desire to
maintain relationships which are free, that is to say, based upon affect and
not obligation. Nevertheless these
same relationships more insecure to the extent that they donıt produce
guarantees nor are subject to formal contracts do not produce frameworks
resources, spaces or bonds for care.
Okay, we havenıt married, we have constructed other kinds of units for
cohabitation but how will we deal with the need for care in these
environments? Will we go back to
the family? To which family, if we
are the youngest members? To the
partners, for those that have them?
Will we have partners?
Speaking in the first person together has its risks. We look back to the family even when it
is not grabbing our chin and turning our face, and its difficult for us to
think of each other as caretakers, or of the few institutions which we generate
as facilities for care. Look out:
the hardcore of care is not tea and cake on a depressive afternoon.
TESTIMONIES FROM THE SHORE
As we began to talk about these questions we came up against the situation of some of us, migrants in domestic service and in care work. In ³First Stutterings² we refer to the transfer of much reproductive work to migrants. This has various consequences which arise from one problem: reproductive work has not been distributed and the conditions of employment make the work of nativeı women more difficult. That homes do not have ³wives² does not mean that things do not have to get done; what is more, they say that in modern homes despite or precisely because of all kinds of technological advances the amount of work is greater. Although income frequently is not especially high, many heterosexual (and homosexual, we imagine) couples avoid the conflict: they contract someone (by the hour) and they are even. If there are children and two salaries, even if the salaries are precarious and/or flexible, the solution, besides the grandmother, is clear. This gives rise to a ³demand², a niche for precarious womenıs work which corresponds perfectly to the ³supply²: that of migrant women who are looking for work or life alternatives in the centers of global capitalism and who cannot opt for other jobs.[37] So there we have the pull and the push. And, from our point of view, what should be insisted upon is the pull: the structure of the Spanish labor market with its explosion of submerged work, underemployment and unemployment. This is especially the case now that, under the neoliberal lens, the impoverishment of the Third World is increasingly regarded as an incapacity to develop and thus something that countries should take care of themselves.
The buying power of middle class households is dropping, and with it the salaries of those who pick up the kid from school, look after the baby, clean and cook, fix up the house, the office or the lobby, take grandma for a stroll or do the babysitting. Those who have more resources or want special services upper class families, companies, institutions take advantage of the general conditions of a sector at the margin of legality, or what is worse, with a legal structure that nurtures abuses. The demand for live-in and day workers, as L. Oso explains, depends upon whether the family has small children; for the middle class sector the live-in worker costs almost the same and does so much more. Single family homes in the periphery of the big city have space enough to lodge a live-in, the architects have designed them that way. Professional couples without children, in the interest of intimacy and affective peace, opt for an assistantı.[38]
the jobs that came up the
most were as a live-in, taking care of children, with four, five kids in
incredible conditions. What comes
up the most is live-in work because - just imagine, if they are looking for day
workers and they pay them 80,000 pesetas for example, and they pay 90,000 to a
live-in with a live-in you have a slave, because the majority of live-in
work, I donıt know if there are exceptions because one canıt generalize everything,
but in most cases they think they are the owners of the person who is there as
a live-in. The person who
contracts you thinks theyıre paying you well, theyıre giving you a house,
theyıre giving you food, and using uniforms, and treating you as an inferior
So they see the case as: Which is a better deal for me, to have a live-in or a
day worker? Clearly the
live-in. So the number of jobs
available for day work goes down and now thereıs barely no day work to be
had. There are very few jobs and
only in conditions in which the people say: I donıt want to have somebody,
because I donıt feel like it, I donıt have the liberty but for these reasons,
not because of the exploitation but because they say: I canıt, because of
personal conditions, intimacy and so on, or they donıt have space to have a
live-in. But in general right now
it is live-in work thatıs available, either with elderly people or with
children. (domestic worker, Globalized Care Workshop I )
This niche, especially in the case of those who work by the hour - generally Spanish women but also immigrants with work permits - has clearly been perceived by service companies. Many workers, seeing how fragile and unpredictable their situations are, opt to sell part of their salary to these growing companies.
It is, without a doubt, a complicated situation, as some women told us during the sessions of the workshop:
The other day a colleague at my job, I work in a place where, well, people are hard-working and have had a period of more or less decent salaries and a certain status, basically middle class, anyway this woman has two children and a husband who works in a company traveling, and the kids are fourteen and eighteen and theyıre driving her crazy, and now her mother is alone and since she fell down the other day she canıt be left alone. A woman who was widowed young and so she has been very independent since she was quite youngso my friend said to me, ³I just donıt know what to do² and I said, ³But this is appalling, nobody can live like this.² So she was thinking about taking a vacation to be with her mother in July and then her mother would go with the other sister in August, but this is too much, no? So then she thought about tele-assistance, but tele-assistance is no good because what her mother really needs is company. That is, the problem isnıt just taking care of an elderly person who in a given moment might hurt herself and then the ambulance would have to come, its that what she is suffering, and to some extent what she is looking for is company and affection. So she looks at the problem and in the end she will make a contract in which she pays a shit salary because thatıs the way it is - to another woman. There is this whole sector of working people who find themselves in this juncture when the kids are still not grown, the parents are already old, and they are stuck in between with men who donıt collaborate and as I see it, even if they do collaborate the pressure that exists in the labor market is such that that wouldnıt solve the problem either, so when there is not a collective resolution of ³we are going to do this for whatever² then everyone fends for themselves however they can, and one of the alternatives is to contract another woman. (Feminist activist and working mother, Globalized Care Workshop III)
To this we must add a central question which we already pointed out in our first stutterings and which is intermixed in each and every one of the aspects which we have gone through above and to which we will continue to refer throughout this book: affect. The literature on the ³global chains of affection², which we will address later, reconstructs the bonds of care in which migrant women link the family members and people being cared for in the country of origin, the families for which they presently work, and the affective relationships they establish in the places where they live. It is not exactly a transfer those that are mothers continue to act as mothers although in a different way, they continue to be university graduates although they work in domestic service; rather it is a reordering or renegotiation of roles and, in this sense, of identities.[39] Among these renegotiations, something has happened and is happening in the Spanish context with the caretaker grandmas, who are so important and of whom so little is spoken.
All the questions derived from this global readjustment are interesting to us. Not as a conflict between women or from a perspective of blame (the liberation of some at the price of oppression of others), a vision which can be perceived in some feminist statements: those which have interpreted postcolonial criticism as an intonation of mea culpa, appealing in the end to individual goodwill. Nor, in the opposite direction, do we see this readjustment as an engine driving the anxiety and the vengeance of real legitimate caretakers against sadistic foreigners: see the recent scandal which the press made about the abuse by an Ecuadorian live-in of the blond twins of an absent white mother. Rather we are interested in these questions as a dynamic which contributes to the reconfiguration of households, families, the sense of intimacy and of the private, the ways of loving, of caring and of managing affect. They interest us also in their connection with sexuality, with an affective continuum which has always been present and which distributes functions as wife, lover, caretaker, sexual servant, companion, mother, contracted wife, etc. They interest us, finally, because the capacity to make alliances and the capacity of the most vulnerable sectors of women to demand negotiation and introduce conflict is what will assure better conditions for all. It is a question of rooting out, once and for all, the idea of loyal or disloyal competition, the clauses of national priority as an excuse to nurture precarization and ethnification, and sexual difference as an argument for ³specialization² in the lowest ranks. Capital fragments the social in order to subtract value, we aggregate to elevate it and to move it into other places. Without a doubt, we find ourselves in a force field, a field in which the symbolic is being created and life practices determined. Its time to intervene. In the end, in one way or another, we are talking about the daily life of each and every one of us.
DAILY WARS
And in terms of strategy what can we say? We have discussed long and hard, this way and that. Really, as a friend from the Feminist Assembly of Madrid says, we have already been thinking this over for a long time, this question of putting life, the sustainability of life, in the center, although we have not yet come upon the solutions or better, the ways, in which to put this invisible conflict into the public space.[40] Perhaps we are getting close. Quantify, valorize, visibilize, withdraw, mercantilize, abolish, industrialize, share, salarize the social economy, reconcile, fight for a domestic social salary
The scenario we are sketching here evidently has little to do with policies of reconciliationı which see institutional feminism and the measures designed in its name as tools forming part of the great narrative of womenıs progressive liberation. Our analysis is different. It is primarily global, in the sense that it contemplates the reality of as many women as possible housewives, workers, from both shores, paid or not, married or not, legal or illegalized, in unions which are recognized or those which are not, etc. as a whole and in relation, as ambiguous and conflictive as this may be. It is worthless for us to talk about reconciliation or even of valorization if we do not also talk about distribution or division, or better yet, of cooperation and conciliation for all in fair conditions. Worthless if when we speak of the home we do not also speak of the precarization of existence and of employment and vice versa. As some critical positions have indicated, the debate on the reconciliation of home and work departs from inadequate premises (it is women who have to do the reconciling) and either avoids crucial questions (such as that of migrant work, that of the legal forms of union and of citizenship, that of precarious and feminine conditions of work) or directs conflicts towards positions of pacification in which inequalities are justified.
The situation of social services and their progressive privatization, as is explained in an interview included in this book, not only does not auger well but predicts serious losses. The distribution of housework is very limited and faces many difficulties due to the resistance of men, the lack of resources and the flexibilization of employment. Women who work in the domestic and care sector have not witnessed any reform in an almost feudal labor legislation.[41] Instead, they have seen how their living conditions have gotten worse amid the flourishing of service companies and immigration policies as well as the traditional difficulty of forcing negotiation in these sectors.
The strategy of visibilizing, valorizing and even quantifying[42] is fundamental, but to this we must add the analysis of precarious work and migration, as until very recently these efforts were based upon the model of a ³typical² (and ³native²) woman, home and employment. These analyses are not always accompanied by reflections which permit a politicization of our lives, which favor the articulation of knowledges, change and collective conflict. The so-called social economy the third sector is sometimes a perversely perfect partner to the opportunities for accumulation offered by the (no longer so) ³new sites of employment² and the recent forms of subcontracting. This is accentuated even more in the case of women. The idea of a social salary, about which we spoke in the national feminist encounter in Cordoba in 2000 and in other meetings, is an opportunity to adjust the debates about work and life. It may, however, leave untouched the question of value, salary and conditions (experienced by domestic employees) and the limits of cooperation (which all of us experience in our homes).
On the other hand, talking
about affect necessarily implies getting past the framework of employment or
even of work and entering into the realm of relation, something inseparable
from any activity but particularly essential in the activities we are talking
about. We are caretakers, all of
us, but moreover we need to be cared for, we like it and we have a right to
it. But the affect that we seek
should not be a question of minimums, of obligation and guilt, of dependence.
Rather it should be a free affect, although (today) this might be linked to a
salary, and for it to be free it must be just. Affect, as we well know, is not a panacea, and it is not
good enough to talk about it in general terms. Love has qualities, and it is a part of social relations
which must be constructed and deconstructed: love, service, work, solidarity,
etc. For this reason the struggles
that are related to affect, such as those in the fields of nursing or
education, are not strictly labor struggles but citizen as well as personal
struggles. They are struggles
against daily wars. And the
challenge which we confront in these workshops is just that: to transform care
into a social claim which modifies affect and converts it into an abundant
common good. Something which has
been a constant challenge for feminism, and which the neoliberal offensive of
recent years has converted into an emergency.
The struggles of caretakers of housewives in impoverished countries, immigrants, social workers are still just beginning, and the burgeoning experiences point to an aggregation that could interrupt the atomization and precarization of personal services, the degradation of the public and the anguish and juggling-acts required by family commitments.[43] The struggles of (under)cared-for people, which have been significantly organized in some countries of the Third World (and have barely existed in Europe, with the possible exception of France), represent the other side of the same problems: resources, quality and cooperation. In this sense, the conflicts produced by migrants and those who work in questions of care, conflicts grounded in work but above all in citizenship, in the imaginary and in lifestyle, demand a greater degree of elaboration and confluence.
³THE CREATIVE IMPULSE²: DRIFT THROUGH THE WORLD OF MEDIA PRODUCTION
MAKING LOGO
In April of 2003 we drifted through the circuits of media precariousness. Media: graphic design, employment related to cultural and media production, temporary jobs in the industry of the spectacle, staff called ³creative², publicity, corporate design, campaigns and promotion of brands yes, yes, the production of logos. Work on codes: translation, language, correction of proofs, editing, investigating, contacting and consulting from the home computer, free-lance in the media, artists without ring or rank, regulars at the casting calls as intermittent workers in the world of the spectacle, etc. Key words: creativity, vocation, connectivity, autonomy, flexibility, merit, proof, realization, professionalism, mobility, (self)education, stress, freeı schedule, projects some talk funny and say things like ³to have some issues on the table² or ³monitoring² or ³cultural units² or other similar things. If you look carefully, those who work in immaterial production are not telephone operators or chain-workers but nevertheless on occasions the tasks of communication, control of semiotic flows and management overlap and the only thing left are the features, symbolically very powerful, of a certain prestige and a certain satisfaction provided by creation, if not of authorshipı then at least of collaborationı, but lest you forget: casual.[44]
Thus we establish a line of continuity between our first drift[45] with the manipulators of codesı and this new drift in the media together with some precarious workers at the National Radio: one with a contract as ³intern²- recently dismissed and the other with a contract ³by job², both of them products of a special Masterıs program offered by the National Communications Entity. We also went hand in hand with a student of images who works in fits and starts in the world of audiovisuals and participates in starving cooperative projects, and, lastly, with a promising young talent in a highly precarized mass production company: Sogecine, which pertains, together with CNN+, Canal+, Canal Digital Satellite, Sogepack and a long list of others, to the company Sogecable.
We take the public transport with Angela and Monica to the Spanish National Television and Radio, with its ministerial hallways from another era, nothing to do with the studios weıve seen in Hollywood movies; we move through the network visiting various little companies in the audiovisual sector, the kind of places where Alejandra has been working and which have given her little leeway to act; we sneak into the central building of a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a leading company to chat with Carolina about the backstage of mainstream cinema. On the way home we stopped for a beer to think over all this production of signs but ended up trapped in a conversation with a fan about how Jennifer López works making beds in a luxury hotel in Manhattan and meets an aggressive executive while disguised as a grand dame and so on and so forth.
The jobs in this field are not specifically feminine though they are ³feminized² in the sense that Haraway gives this term. Our interest in them has to do with three things: (1) their component of attention (something which they share, for example, with telephone operators, social workers and caregivers) and of image/performance (something which, leaving aside the glamour, puts them alongside retail workers in chain stores), (2) their capacity to generate imaginary and, in this sense, to conform gender, or in Teresa de Lauretisıs words, their function as technologies of gender and (3) the growing number of women who work in these sectors. Evidently here there are key differences in contact with the public, the exposure or visibility that the media or culture industry has compared, for example, to translation. We are talking about a vast field which we will have to learn to delimit as we investigate.
In our first stutterings we made a survey of these points: of the working conditions in small new networked companies, in which it is not a question of major companies externalizing and contracting other companies but rather of major companies directly converting their former departments into subsidiaries, and thus liberating themselves from the obligation to respect labor agreements. We have also talked about the maximization of knowledge, affective resources and - in the case of the media, publicity and culture industry more than anywhere of connectivity, without this translating into income or stability. We have talked about other types of contracts which predominate at the lowest levels: internships, practica, contracts by job or no contract at all. And we have discussed the flexibility of schedules, the meager salaries and rights, the lack of delimitation of tasks, the polyvalence, the diffuse hierarchies oriented to promote self regulation, etc.[46]
CONNECTIONISM AND MEDIATION IN SEMIO-CAPITALISM
Aside from all of the above, there is something particular about this kind of work, although this something is present in varying degrees in all kinds of activities: social value and relational value. These jobs one does out of vocation and as an investment in oneself. Therefore the learning process (free) never ends and the result, the work itself, is in many cases a nexus of connections and possibilities one must know how to maximize.[47]
These connections and possibilities are associated with technology and (self)education (such as in programming or design), inventive, intellectual or performative tasks (such as in fashion or the art world) and in the realms of power and public influence (such as the cinema, the media and advertisement). Connectivity, the clientıs portfolio, and the contacts one establishes for future projects constitute central elements in what Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski have exhaustively characterized as the city by projects, whose precedents are art criticism and scientific investigation. This city they oppose to others such as the domestic, the commercial, the inspired, the industrial or the city of renown, with any of which the city by projects may coexist.
³In a reticulated world, social life is composed of the successive multiplication of encounters and connections with diverse groups. The encounters are temporary but can be reactivated, and are realized occasionally at great social, professional, geographical and cultural distances. The project is the occasion and the pretext for the connection, temporarily uniting dissimilar people and presenting itself as a strongly activated extremity of the network during a relatively short period of time, but which permits the forging of more enduring links which, although they remain inactive for a while, will always be available.² (p.155, El nuevo espiritu del capitalismo, Madrid, Akal, 2002)
The
rhetoric of projects presents a base for evaluation: merit; and the technique
for measuring it: the test period.
What I see in radio and in the media in general is
that you work as if you were on display, I donıt know, imagine someone who
works in an office and for two hours a day she gets filmed. In these two hours she would really
make it look as if she were doing something, she would take pains to shine. So I see that since we have two
hours a day in which our work is exposed, in which we are really being
evaluated, we have to put our shoulders to the grindstone. Its not like having
some papers which, in some other job, you might say Iıll do these tomorrow.ı
In this job you really canıt, its that at six oıclock I am live on the air and
I have to say something. So yes
you take work home with you, I take all the magazines home with me and I
underline them in the subway, and before sleeping. Its been a long time since Iıve read a book because I read
all the music magazines in bed and then I crash. Now no, somebody gave me a book for my birthday and I
decided Iım going to leave the magazines and read a book² (Drift through the Media, first stop.)
The
generalized orientation towards communication as a process is fundamental. It is no longer a matter of the old
subject-object or emission-message-reception schemes, now it is a different and
much more sophisticated model inspired in pragmatism, semiotics,
ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism. In this orientation shared and unshared codes are put into
play, the meaningless and the misunderstood, the implicit, the performative and
the illocutionary force, the mediation and translation of some signs to others,
gestures and, in general, incarnation, expectations, tastes and habits. Thus the features of the information
regime[48]
fragmentation, preeminence of the visual, modular assemblage, synopsis,
des/recontextualization, interchangeability, integrity, motion sensitivity - do not form static and discreet functional units as
in the industrial period but rather units that are reversible and recombinable,
also in function of feedback processes: market studies, polls, call-ins,
audience levels and sale of associated products, etc.
Carolina
told us all this in relation to her job in the production department of
Sogecine. Speaking, for example,
of how to project an hypothetical feminine audience:
in fact I think Sogecine has a reputation for being very sexist, sexist and
masculine. Then, I have such funny
examples they call you once in a while to see a preview; you are what they
call a targetı, the intended audience so youıre a woman from 18-35 years old,
and theyıre going to show you a preview and youıre supposed to cry like a woman
from 18-35 years (they donıt say that, they just assume it) and then they show
you some horrible cutesy thing, and then when I tell them that I think its
hideous, I think its horribly cutesy, they respond: Youıre just a tomboy, get
out of here, somebody find a different girl (Media drift, third stop).
We
came across this little example of personal feedback which provided us with
some keys for thinking about the lines of symbolic reproduction montage yes,
but always of the same thing and the devices of self-regulation which those
of us who work in the manipulation of mass codes develop. Carolina commented that this could even
produce a gap in the tasks of mediation, for example, between the film and the
translation which the producer makes of it in the preview. This labor of
mediation is oriented to the average, the majority, the commercial, what we
know works and what we already have under control. And, what is more, it is not determined by a boss; in
Sogecine there are more bosses than employees. The orientation could be determined by anyone: from the
author of the script to the developer, the one who designs the poster or who
organizes the debut
But
the matter goes beyond just this; it is a task of inventing majorities, of
converting minorities into majorities, of codification of difference as a
commodity. We refer to a circuit,
not a one-way relationship.
It is in their interest that I be here, if it werenıt I wouldnıt be here. I donıt have commercial tastes, and
that is just what interests them, moreover, here I think its even more extreme,
but in Canal + for example, Canal+Television is producing tons of different
programs, directed to a very different public, and in which they are looking
for a lot of innovation, much more than here, because this is already a much
riskier business and so you have to cover your back more, and not take too many
risks. With a TV program if you
donıt it and its not working then you stop it and that's that. But here if something doesnıt do well
in the box-offices youıre running the risk that they shut down the whole
company for next year, you know? I
think that in this terrain you canıt explore much, not from here, maybe from
television you can create a lot more.
And then lets not kid ourselves, TV doesnıt have anything like the
audiences the movies have, its much more mainstream, and itıs a much more
immediate kind of consumption. A
movie, from the time you begin it until it is made a year goes by, and maybe in
a given moment thereıs a demand for something, but in two years when it is
finally finished it doesnıt work anymore, or it does Its much more difficult
from there to see the effect they have.
³Los lunes al sol² (Mondays in the sun) for example, nobody imagined
that it was going to be such a success.
Nobody. In fact when it was
released the provisions it was distributed by Sogepak, the distributor here
the provisions were for two hundred, three hundred million in box-office, and
now its already made 1500. One
canıt know (Media drift, third stop)
But
then, if we are talking about a circuit, we have the audiences who occasionally
escape expectations or produce real innovations which later might be mediated,
as has occurred with the hybrid culture of rap or with Mexican soap-operas,
whose Latin American cultural keys have been recodified in the global
market. The media conglomerates,
with their tendency to centralize control and management, somehow coexist with
the multiple and scattered productive processes, including the points of
flight, with forms of collaboration and exchange between the entities intended
to facilitate co-production and third, with the often ambivalent character of
audience mobilization. These
interpret and use the media in different local contexts and turn, for that
purpose, to different frames of reference. Such that not everything can be foreseen.
Thus
the experiences in the universe of information are contradictory. Those who read globalization solely in
terms of homogenization and cultural imperialism forget the frequency of
(contradictory) tendencies towards diversification, hybridization, dislocation
and decentralization of references, the formation of new transnational and
virtual communities, the ease (if not the equality) of access to and
manipulation of the tools and codes of information, the relevance of local and
alternative media and the lines of interaction.
Indymedia
provides a good example of the orientation which confrontation will take from
now on: ³Donıt hate the media, become the media² say those who inhabit the
digital experience and manage to mock the restrictions of the cables. Creative impulses and technological intimacy
produce notable crises in the manipulators of codes; our guides spoke
extensively about this throughout the drift. The possibility of putting creativity somewhere else;
detaching it from one circuit to plug it into another is a desire and a frustration
we should keep very much in mind.
TECHNOLOGIES
OF GENDER. WHEN THE PERSONAL IS DIGITALı
In
spite of the insistence upon access and the proliferation and diversification
of points of emission, reception, circulation and reproduction, there are also
problems with representations and in this sense our politics, as Stuart Hall
suggests, must be (de)constructive, especially when we are faced with the
hegemonic images of gender.
So
let us clarify that this dilemma has nothing to do with the dichotomy form/content,
which today is too rudimentary. We
are talking about the articulation of knowledges, techné, discursivities and sociabilities in the information
regime. Cyberfeminism has captured
this reformulation of the problem by analyzing the material and symbolic links
between technoscience and technoculture and the rhetorics of gender. Some of the accounts in this book make
reference to this question.
Besides pointing out certain limits to information-utopias,
cyberactivists are indicating - without any concessions to nostalgia - the
pitfalls of multiple and polymorphic reincarnations in virtual space. The informatics of domination promises new monsters and new stories, but
nevertheless this, like technological mediation itself, is far from guaranteeing
us a postmodern humanity. Just ask
Trinity.
We
continue with this question of the technologies of gender. In our chance encounters we have talked
about the Jennifer Lopéz, humble youth, habitually of Latin or Italian origin,
who cleans rooms and fantasizes of a sudden and amorous social ascent; the same
story as Pretty Woman from whore
to impeccable lady and as that most unpleasant film An Officer and a
Gentleman in which an industrial
worker dreams of, and finally becomes, the fiancée of a guy from West Point
with whom she walks out of the factory arm in arm in the final scene. Alright, we could cite other sexed,
sexualized and racialized mass representations, cut from the same pattern. Moreover we have come across the new
constructivist spirit of Nike[49]
and other gender fantasies those the sex workers have told us about, for
example whose materiality is in direct relation with the social and economic
value they put into play.
Technified visibility overexposure and the dissolving borders of
privacy - the immediacy and
growing autonomy of communication and culture with respect to identifiable,
countable facts all have a lot to do with the new ways of objectifying the body
of women in close-ups, fragmentation and in mechanisms of shock and anesthesia. The mutations of sensorium, which
Benjamin analyzed with reference to technical reproduction and the
possibilities of montage, have intensified and now we enter a new phase. In the words of our gurus: ³When the
digital is political².
The
historical transformations of identities and gender relations in the media do
not leave much room for optimism, although we know that what happens on the
reception side can be a whole different story. And about production, including feminist production, there
is a lot to be said. In parallel,
the introduction of parodic discursivities, with Madonna in the lead,
throughout the last years, has opened new horizons which have awakened great
enthusiasm in some feminist circles.
Post-feminism, queer theory, post-pornography, prosthetic feminism: by
reclaiming the reflexive and constructive character of gender identities they
make manifest the artifice, the inscription and subversion of codes. Our capacities.
FEMINIST POLITICS
As we explained at the beginning of this
text, our comings and goings have illuminated some paths for political
action. We will attempt to order
this a bit, speaking from the midst of the process.
First of all, and thanks to the workshops we conducted on
Globalized Careı we have managed to work out a few points of attack. The
crisis of care, or better, the political articulation of this fact, which from
one or the other side of the sea effects all of us, is one of those
points. We donıt think there is a
simple way of posing the question, a single formula like a social salary,
salaries for housewives, distribution of tasks, or anything like that. Any solutions will have to be
combined. This is a submerged and
many-legged conflict, involving immigration policy, the conception of social services,
work conditions, family structure, affect which we will have to take on as a
whole but with attention to its specificities.
Facing securitarian and criminalizing discourses from both
the Right and the Left we must thematize security as a collective good,
centered in the sustainability of existence. The media doesnıt talk about this question, the politicians
even less. Once in a while a
sociologist appears, alluding to the population pyramid or the changes in the
forms of the family. Others, progressive
ones, begin to argue against the government that in fact we need migrants, but
we still havenıt freed ourselves from the their instrumentalization: we need
them, yes, but as a work force and as uteruses for procreation.
In the midst of all this, there are sectors which are on
the warpath, among them the service
companies but also the insurance companies which are seeing how dependency
policies can be fit in as an alternative, for those who can afford them, to the
public system of pensions. All of
this is little discussed, and the overexploitation of women in (family or
salaried) regimes of care work is even discussed even less. The terms of the sexual contract are in
play and we would like to contribute to making them explicit and, above all,
politicizing them.
And then there is our fascination with the world of
sex-work which we have been encountering bit by bit, and which once again
situates us in a complex map in which we have to look at migration policy and
labor rights, but also rights in the realm of the imaginary. There is a continuum here, which for
the moment we are calling Care-Sex-Attention, and which encompasses much of the activity in all of the
sectors we have investigated.
Affect, its quantities and qualities, is at the center of a chain which
connects places, circuits, families, populations, etc. These chains are producing phenomena
and strategies as diverse as virtually arranged marriages, sex tourism,
marriage as a means of passing along rights, the ethnification of sex and of
care, the formation of multiple and transnational households.
In our self-evaluation retreat (and football tournament)
of October 2003 we sketched out a grid of categories and types of work. The grid was immense and kept growing
and we only managed to fill in one row of it, which we had to divide into
sub-categories and annotate with thousands of notes in the margin. In any case, the intention of the grid
was to overlay and compare the realities of feminized precarious work. Complexity just look at how po-mo we
are! attacks any structuralist attempt; but even so we continue to think
about elaborating hypotheses, making statements which, without renouncing
complexity, can express what is happening to us.
Second, we have talked about the need to produce slogans
which are able to bring all these points
together. Past slogans have become
too limited for us, too general, too vague. Permitting ourselves a delirious brainstorm in the last
session of the Globalized Careı workshops, we realized that some of these
slogans could take us into spaces as ambivalent but as necessary demanding the
ability to have and raise children, while at the same time taking up the
radical discourses of the family as a device of control, dependence and blame
of women. Shocking, no?
Third, the necessity of constructing points of
aggregation against atomization and
solitude is clear. Curiously, our process of wandering the city has led us to
value more the denied right to territorialize ourselves. If this territorialization cannot take
place in a mobile and changing work place, then we will have to construct more
open and diffuse spaces within this city-enterprise. The Laboratorio de Trabajadoras that we are considering constructing would be an
operative place/moment to come together with our conflicts, our resources
(legal resources, work, information, mutual care and support, housing, etc.),
our information and our sociability.
To produce agitation and reflection. A good idea, and a difficult one: at the moment we are
thinking about it, not only the practical aspects but particularly the capacity
this might have to construct itself as a means of attracting, connecting and
mobilizing sectors as different as domestic workers and telephone operators. One of the branches of this project
would be a documentation center about precariousness in the feminine.
Fourth, we hope to strengthen the local and
international alliances we have established
in the process so far. The book
and the video which we have just published are meant as a means to this
end. We will use the video to
return to the spaces we have passed through in the past year or so, to the health center and the community
center, in the plaza and in cyberspace, to the European Social Forum and to the
neighborhood school in order to keep open the conversations we have begun.
Fifth, we underline the importance of public utterances
and visibility: if we want to break social
atomization, we have to intervene with strength in the public sphere, circulate
other statements, produce massive events which place precariousness as a
conflict upon the table, linking it to the questions of care and
sexuality. One concrete proposal
in this direction would be to construct forms of intervention, perhaps using
guerrilla communication as some friends are already doing. We hope to act in the fields of care
and of sex-work in alliance with other groups of women like Las Tejedoras,
domestic workers, telephone operators we know, the Feminist Assembly, Hetaira
and other groups. And beyond the
local, in the European space: with MAIZ,[50]
with the women linked to the NextGenderation Network,[51]
and in general with those women that have approached us and with whom we may
yet converge. The drift which we
did about job-hunting in the major chain stores in times of war gave us a few
hints as to where to begin in a terrain as unexplored as that of job interviews
or the filters of personnel selection.
For the moment, we detect three types of latent conflicts
(or conflicts which exist but are invisible or individual): 1) generalized
absenteeism from non-professional work (telemarketing, chain-store retail and
service); 2) the demand for other contents and other forms within the
precarious professions (nursing, communications) and; 3) the demand for recognition
in the traditionally invisible sectors (domestic and sex work). The hybridization of these types must
be taken into account, and our strategies must be drawn from the resources,
modalities and opportunities that these particular kinds of work provide. We have seen a few interesting
experiments in this direction, from the rebel call-shop workers to the media
workers who have used the tools they have at hand to project other messages. This is a challenge to investigate
further in the very nature of these kinds of work, their strong and weak
points, their common connections in a personal politics of the
city/citizenship.
Another proposal which is out there has to do with the
idea of constructing a May Day of the socially precarious in Madrid: that is, a
moment of eruption in the streets of Madrid, taking advantage of the symbolic
weight of the 1st of May but directed to reapropriating this weight,
working together with all the groups in the city which are in these moments
trying to think about and act from and against precariousness: an eruption
intended as a form of expression for all these atypical workers, semi-workers
and non-workers who, despite all this, are weaving the social fabric every day.
There have already been a few steps in this direction in our immediate circles,
though, it must be said, not always with much success.
And sixth, we begin to consciously encounter the need to
mobilize common economic and infrastructural resources. We
want to be able to freeı[52]
people, just like the parties do: free from illegality, free from
precariousness. We could organize
a marriage agency, we can disobey, falsify, pirate, shelter and whatever else
occurs to us. The proposal of the Laboratorio
de Trabajadores space, as well as almost
any other proposal, requires money, and money, well... We donıt want to fall into the star
system, touring and talking and not developing the local network that is so
important to us, nor do we want to fall into the dependency of
subventions. In short, weıre
thinking these things over, all to the tune of ³Pasta Ya!²[53]
The resources weıre concerned about are as much immaterial and affective as they are material. Our bid is to construct a pro comun. <