Aug 18, 2013
Yet, these materials [parliamentary reports] have their own sensational force, and Marx’s appropriation of them constitutes another step in the process of constructing an affectively powerful representation of the laboring body. Particularly striking is the focus on the labor of women and children, whose exploitation seems more reprehensible because their bodies are more fragile. […] what is at stake here is not simply their experience of suffering but the threat their loss of humanity poses to conceptions of personhood.
Cvetkovich, “Marx’s Capital and the Mystery of the Commodity” in Mixed Feelings, 183