+Nattering on the Net 2.0

Cyberfeminist Publics and Women’s Digital and Material Labor

#DL14

Twitter id – cyberdivalivesl

Radhika Gajjala

Bowling Green State University

radhikagajjala.org

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This powerpoint is based on presentations given at the New School events on November 4th, 2014

http://events.newschool.edu/event/gender_studies_speakers_series#.VGYkOr6aHKA

And on November 14th, 2014

http://events.newschool.edu/event/digital_labor_sweatshops_picket_lines_barricades#.VGYjob6aHKA

+Spinning Barishta

+Women’s labor

Radhika Gajjala, 2014

+Cyberfeminism 2.0

+Free labor, Affective labor, Immaterial Labor, Digital Labor (Unwaged Labor)

+Some Key themes New Domesticity meets Web 2.0

Women and the public sphere

Women and waged labor

Crafsters and Digital Craft communities

DIY political economies

Digital Labor through domestic sphere

Geek Grrls meet DIY - DIY makes Geek Grrls

Wom-entreprenuers 2.0

Leisure Commons

Space bias – Visual bias – Affect bias

+ New Domesticity meets Web 2.0

“In between folding laundry and cleaning up after her children, a mom receives $5,000 to blog about an iPhone application for seven days. Another woman earns twice as much as her husband’s $35,000 annual salary by hosting several one-hour “Twitter parties” each week.”

Forbes Magazine - 2012

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“this new generation of Homemaker 2.0 bloggers has a unique and crucial role in the current revival of domesticity: they’re actively trying to make traditional women’s work cool.”

Matchar, Emily (2013-05-07). Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity (p. 49). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

+Geek Grrls meet DIYDIY makes Geek Grrls

+Leisure Commons

Leisure as per formative paradigm and necessary for insividualization subject formation

Leisure commons and leisure publics

Internet as Factory/Internet as Playground

Making and connecting – maker affect vs commodity fetishism

Process as commodity /monetizing the visual

+Space bias –Visual bias –Affect bias -

• Time to craft, Time to digitize

• Visualizing Process, hashtag communities

• Process as commodity/Visual as commodity

• Creation/Extraction of Surplus Labor

+differential biopolitical economy of time

• Monetizing “free labor” vs Wages for Housework, Leisure as Work, “Digital natives”, Social Entrepreneurship

• “the differential biopolitical economy of time”• “temporal politics grounded in an understanding

of how social experiences of time are multiple and uneven.”

Sharma, Sarah (2014-01-07). In the Meantime: Temporality and Cultural Politics, Duke University Press. Kindle Edition.

+ Issues of race and class“free labor” and the politics of time, space and virtual/leisure commons

Free labor “working all the time sentiment” …The concept of free labor doesn’t lead to a demand for a social wage. It has given them added value.

When it's not a spatial response. Slow and fast will collide in the everyday in response to the needs of capital accumulation and basic wage earning – and meeting the “market” where it is.

+ Issues of race and class“free labor” and the politics of leisure/virtual commons

much creativity is invested in the production of “virtual commons” and forms of sociality that thrive under the radar of the money/ market economy.

Silvia (2012-11-01). Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions) (p. 141). PM Press.

Capital itself does not flow – it extracts surplus labor (through slowing of time, through leisure, through “affect”, through digital presence and travel and through speed).

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But ultimately the social weakness of the wageless has been and is the weakness of the entire working class with respect to capital.

the availability of unwaged labor, both in the “underdeveloped” countries and in the metropolis, has allowed capital to leave those areas where labor had made itself too expensive, thus undermining the power that workers there had reached. Whenever capital could not run to the “Third World,” it opened the gates of the factories to women, blacks, and youth in the metropolis or to migrants from the “Third World.” Thus it is no accident that while capitalism is presumably based on waged labor, more than half of the world’s population is unwaged.

Federici, Silvia (2012-11-01). Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle

+Thankyou!radhikagajjala.org