#feminized labor

[campgender]

reading dorothy allison write of amber hollibaugh, “i watched her nurture lovers and their books, watched her set hers aside over and over again to help someone else,” and thinking about kennedy & davis saying compared to butches they interviewed, fems talked less about their internal experiences during their memories & more about what was happening in the community (which i want to be clear is the product of their specific social environment & not some inherent difference)

& thinking about how much i’ve coped with being homebound through recognizing my impact on the world through my partners’ actions, the way my support is part of the invisibilized scaffolding making their writing & research & activism & protection of others possible

guess my takeaway goes both directions: my own writing is just as much a part of my legacy, and no work is done in isolation — the femme who nurtures their lovers’ work is often positioned as synonymous with the cishet academic’s wife, both of whom are met with contemptuous pity (i’m reminded of rachel wiley asking “do you love femmes or just femme labor?” — but they only love femme labor when they don’t know it’s there)

but the solution isn’t for everybody to go write independently unnurtured; rather ideally everybody would have options, would be supported & respected in their work & have that work valued, including & especially when it’s the work of nurturing. to nurture lovers & their books (their posters, their journal articles, their speeches) is one of the two great callings & crafts of my current life, one of the most fulfilling & rewarding things i’ve ever done — an impact invisibilized even to myself until the months & years they spent painting it neon pink for me.

& when i’m ready to write, they nurture me right back.

[daloy-politsey]

You can thank teachers, a female dominated occupation that is very often grossly underpaid, for every high paying male professional that you see for essential services like lawyers, doctors, and engineers.

[moonssugar]

there definitely is a difference between how people approach feminized labor bc lately ive become a personal grocery shopper instead of delivering from restaurants (way more efficient for gas and pay). i go the delivery app that i use reddit's page (mistake) and everyone is complaining about grocery deliveries, how hard it is to find things, needing to keep orders separate, needing to take time to find things, needing to know where things are in the first place and being efficient with time. and it occurs to me these kind of skills for grocery shopping is something that was instilled in me early via being with my mom all the time and helping her shop. because shes the one expected to shop for food being a woman and marred to a man for her family, im expected to learn these gendered skills under her. the few times ive gone to the grocery store with my dad he just leaves me to my own devices and my mom would often comment that when he goes by himself he never gets necessities and essentials, usually just snacks and a few things. never things you need for long time meal planning (another kind of feminized labor) or things to feed more than one person in any substantial way. thats left for my mom to figure out and left for other women to figure out while their kids tag along in the stores.

so when i go on reddit and see guys complaining about how hard it is to grocery shop even though they could get paid to do it, they still refuse to do it because its seen as hard, degrading and too complicated. and yes the people calling in these grocery orders are just offloading that labor to someone who gets paid less than they should for it anyways but the avoidance of certain kinds of labor even with incentives for the deliverers reveals a lot about how people may view that labor and what they think is below them. my first thought is "why? this grocery shit is easy" and then it occurs to me no one ever taught the majority of these people those skills because it would never be expected of them to know or use. someone else is expected to do it instead

[nessiopeia]

Thinking about that tweet I’ll never be able to find the source of again:

“Before trans women transition, others sense what’s going on and use us as an unlimited source of free feminized labor because they know it’s one of the few ways we can feel gender euphoria and that we’d be too ashamed and embarrassed about it to tell anyone.” (Please tell me who said this)

[allslost]

To be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited workday; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex.

A Manifesto for Cyborgs, Donna Haraway (20)

[thepeacockangel]

I Don’t Believe In Markets, I Don’t Believe In Exchange

One of the reasons I distrust systems where people doing "valuable" work get paid more (even under a supposedly socialist system) is that there are so many types of unpaid, unacknowledged forms of labor done by oppressed people that are vital to the functioning of society but are rarely if ever really acknowledged as valuable and like some of these are forms of labor some or many of us are cool with providing, but we just want them to be acknowledged as valuable skills that not everyone has, and like I just don't trust society to start acknowledging them because we have a "socialist" system.

Like emotional labor, domestic labor, aesthetic and logistical labor to just make things "nice", being the ones who think of shit like "oh people will want the stiffer paper plates for the sloppy joes" or whatever, like it doesn't seem that necessary until you try to run anything without someone thinking about that shit and then your event and space is a mess and no one wants to be there or be involved. The nice little touches, feminized stuff, aesthetic stuff, supposedly impractical shit about making spaces and experiences just a little more pleasant actually makes a world of difference.

Feminized labor is like the User Experience department of the entire world and you better fucking respect the UE department, but also like I think there are so many tiny little things we've never thought of as "real labor" that I don't trust anyone to catch every little act that needs to be compensated and so you'll still have the valorized fields getting paid extra and those of us who are just quietly expected to get the coffee dealing with everyone's shit.

[que-onda-la-blog]

“Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore,” Lukas Biewald, CEO of the site CrowdFlower, was quoted as saying in The Nation.

Shawn Wen, “The Ladies Vanish”

[ctatum]

marilyn minter, hands dumping, 1988, enamel on metal, 24 x 30 inches