"Goodman''s work is a unique contribution to materialist feminist theory, and no one other than Goodman has so clearly articulated the key theoretical dilemmas while offering specific ways to advance beyond the gaps and omissions in the existing body of research in this area." (David B. Downing, Symploke, Vol. 23 (1), 2015) "Goodman closely analyzes an impressive array of second wave and poststructuralist feminist texts, and draws cultural critique into conversation with political economy. Gender Work succeeds in setting the table for a much needed critical re-engagement with Marxism." (Susan Ferguson, Labour.Le Travail, Issue 75, 2015) "This book marks a path-breaking turn in feminist theory, where feminism illuminates the transfigured conditions of contemporary global society under neoliberalism. Goodman brilliantly restores the primacy of labor and class to feminist theory, political analysis, and social agency alike.
Her riveting analyses recasts culture and everyday life as they reframe the capital flows of globalization. What results is extraordinary: an urgent, timely, and truly global feminist theory of how women''s work changes the world." - Jennifer Wicke, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Virginia, USA "Why are women''s labor, time, and sociality more and more central to the workings of capitalism? Goodman''s tour de force analysis of feminist and Marxian writings provides a variety of persuasive answers. Her book will be indispensable to a wide range of readers who want the most up-to-date thinking on this topic." - Andrew Ross, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University, USA David B. Downing, Professor, Department of English, Indiana University of PennsylvaniaGoodman''s manuscript is a major contribution to feminist scholarship. This new book from a leading feminist critic integrates sophisticated theoretical understanding with practical political intervention into the escalating exploitation of women''s labor in the global economy. The title of her book appropriately suggests that the social construction of gender has a great deal to do with the material circumstances of all dimensions of women''s work, both paid and unpaid, especially as those conditions have been so dramatically affected by the neoliberal economy.
Goodman directly addresses the urgency of the current situation whereby free market fundamentalism, the privatization of many public spheres, the destruction of welfare state protections, and the financialization of everyday life have disproportionately affected women in all quarters of the globe. Gender therefore needs more than ever to be theorized in the context of work, labor, and the mode of production. To this extent, Goodman works directly in the field of materialist feminism, and she clarifies the key issues with strikingly lucid prose, even when grappling with complex theoretical difficulties.As she puts it ''feminist theory needs to reconsider the relationship between labor and gender within its own legacies'' (3). Goodman''s analysis directly confronts what many news reports have characterized as the current ''war on women'' that consists of a long list of policy changes affecting women''s lives from unequal pay, to healthcare reductions and restrictions, to welfare cuts, to childcare limitations, to abortion rights, etc. Despite these tangible threats to women, feminist theory has still often neglected economic, labor, and class considerations. Goodman offers a powerful corrective to the tendencies of many feminist critics to separate the private sphere from ''paid production,'' but as Goodman explains ''Gender can be read as inside such divisions'' (6), and by attending to these very tensions, she can clearly articulate how and why the exploitable domains of private ''''women''s work'' creates value for capital'' (6). Although Second Wave Feminism often focused on ''women''s work,'' Goodman provides a much needed integration of class, gender, and work in feminist theory, especially in these times ''where ''women''s work'' is producing new symbolic structures that enhance and multiply possibilities for profit within neoliberal economies'' (10).
Her goal is to articulate ''different types of feminist interventions, arguments, and analytical constructions that the ''feminization of work'' makes visible'' (15). She concludes the intro with her general thesis: she ''seeks to ground a theoretically-informed politics about changes in the gendered structure of labor'' (19). In working for such a politically informed theoretical perspective, she considers the traditions of Marxism and feminism, but also the key challenges and insights posed by poststructuralist theories of language, representation, and signification. She never loses sight in these theoretical forays into the key links between gender and work, and that accomplishment is worthy of considerable admiration. I will now say a bit about each of the body chapters:Chapter One provides a brilliant overview of the Feminist/Marxist debates while offering new ways to overcome some of the recurring problems and blind spots that have troubled these respective critical traditions. In this wide-ranging chapter, Goodman draws deeply on the innovative work by David Harvey (as well as some of the key Marxist and feminist critics such as Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Leopoldina Fortunati, Luce Irigaray, Juliet Mitchell, Christine Delphy, Lise Vogel, and many others) as she works through and clarifies many of Marx''s basic formulations, and re-situates the latter''s ideas in a contemporary framework. As Goodman explains, ''Much feminist theory has seen this split in the function of labor-power''s reproduction as an example at best of Marx''s ambivalence, and at worst of his negligence in understanding the social position and specific oppression of women under capitalism'' (39). But she also counters this critique by explaining how and why ''Marx is concerned at every level about how capital sucks profits out of unpaid time, in reference to production'' (40), and how this insight relates to the exploitation of women''s work, both underpaid and unpaid.
She offers innovative ways of thinking about reproductive labor, autonomy, productive time, the division of labor, and women''s work. She concludes Chapter 1 with her key proposal for rethinking these issues: ''working time needs to be understood in relation to women''s time in order to create a possibility for a radical redistribution of control over working time. Such a redistribution of control over working time is necessary now for countering the neoliberal forces that produce economic inequalities by dispossessing time'' (88).Chapter Two follows logically from the overview of Feminist/Marxist concerns since it turns to one of the most widely known feminist writers, Julia Kristeva, who integrates psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist concerns. Kristeva is a difficult writer, so the challenge of writing about those difficulties poses its own dilemma. But I think Goodman does a wonderful job, and she does so partly by focusing on Kristeva''s three volume set of detective novels, Possession, rather than strictly theoretical work. This chapter therefore has the distinct advantage that the concrete representational work of a novel allows the reader to really see more vividly the theoretical dilemmas being engaged in specific contexts. Goodman demonstrates how Kristeva''s fiction exemplifies her provocative contentions that matricide configures key functions with respect to representation in the West: the killing of the mother/woman allows for identity and subjectivity in the symbolic order.
These abstract formulations, however, Goodman works through in the course of some close readings of the novels themselves. Goodman''s key point is to illuminate how Kristeva has theorized the links between femininity, revolt, and economic transformation. Again, these are theoretically complex issues, so when reading this chapter, it takes some time to follow the details of this argument, but it will likely pay off for any reader interested in Kristeva''s work. It also pays off in strategic ways with respect to how Goodman has organized her book: her analysis of Kristeva''s efforts to disrupt the symbolic order of representation opens up new ways of thinking about women''s socialization processes as offering imaginative alternatives to neoliberal capitalism, an insight that she later tries to work out in greater detail in her concluding chapter. Chapter 3 directly confronts the historical situation whereby by the late 1990s feminist critical theory seemed to subside with the increasing rise of neoliberal economics. The many gains in understanding the social construction of gender, especially with respect to the linguistic and poststructuralist theories of representation and signification, were sometimes muted by the way this theory was incorporated into the global economy. As Goodman puts it, ''this slow-down in the production of feminist theory coincided with a consolidation of a neoliberalism that began in the seventies and expanded'' (120). Goodman herself represents a newer generation of feminist theorists who have refocused the study of sex and gender around work rather than language.
Goodman then works to extend the work of Aihwa Ong, Donna Harraway, and Judith Butler. Quite strikingly, Goodman acknowledges the brilliance of these feminist theorists, but she significantly articulates how some of their work represents a kind of ''block in the forward trajectory of feminist theory,'' and Goodman''s focus on materialist practices enables her to work through these blocks. She does so by first theorizing the links between the deconstruction of social identity and the rise of neoliberal economics: as she puts it, the shrewd feminist ''dismantling of identity'' had the unfortunate and unintended consequence of dovetai.