Papers Session Annual Meeting 2023

Not Only of Our Hands: The Multitude of Labor

Sunday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM | Grand Hyatt-Republic A (4th Floor) Session ID: A19-306
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

Each of the papers in this panel considers a different aspect of labor under capitalism: unpaid, reproductive, racialized, gendered, educational. What emerges is a fuller sense of the multiple ways capitalistic systems extract and exploit labor, but also the points of possible resistance and solidarity.

Papers

Neoliberalism operates not only as a set of economic policies characterized by globalization and free markets, but also a coercive rationality that has profoundly shaped our collective work ethic. Building on affective political theologian Karen Bray's Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed, the purpose of this paper is to examine the explicit goals - the teleological ends - of neoliberalism, to articulate how the exploitation of our free time through unpaid labor is crucial in neoliberalism's telos, and to articulate the affective toll living under such conditions engender.

Neoliberal regimes of commodification have wed the task of credentialing students for work to the labor of contingent faculty and graduate workers who function, from their employer’s point of view, as specialized credentialers of students toward market work. Drawing from experience simultaneously teaching religion to undergraduates and organizing fellow academic workers, this paper argues that the practices of academic labor organizing and labor-based grading can work in tandem to resist the institutional imperative of credentialing and thereby teach “against the grain of capitalism.” They do this precisely by emphasizing “labor” as a relevant category and “worker” as a relevant identity—for students and teachers both. 

This paper examines how Christian theology became enmeshed with capitalist ideologies of patriarchal white supremacy through the emergence of the Lost Cause in the years after the Civil War. Following the war, the United States faced a reality that was both a challenge and an opportunity: for the first time, legalized chattel slavery would no longer form one of the key pillars of U.S. economic life. How would the United States structure its economy when it could no longer unapologetically exploit the stolen labor of enslaved people? Populists and union organizers, industrial capitalists, and southern planters all had different visions of the future of economic life in the United States after the Civil War, and they all invoked Christian theology to support their positions. This paper explores how these debates might inform a Christian theological defense of economic democracy against the exploitative conditions of racial capitalism today.

This paper is a close reading of the metaphors of gestation and childbirth that deployed in Rubem Alves' A Theology of Human Hope, and its negative view of abortion in particular, which grows out of Alves' failure to recognise gestation as work in its full, alienated condition. This unrealised possibility is still more prominent as a result of the text’s Marxian analysis of labour, which is offered in contrast, set apart from Alves’ gestational metaphors as if the two do not interact. I aim ultimately to miscarry Alves’ metaphors towards what I argue is something closer to their fruition, for an understanding of abortion as generative, by amplifying the moments of internal contradiction in the text, and applying his analysis of labour to his own metaphors. I find in Alves’ work the timely hope for a politics of the child severed from the politics of reproduction in/of the family.

Audiovisual Requirements
LCD Projector and Screen
Tags
#white supremacy
#Liberation Theology
#Economic democracy
#social reproduction
#Marxist Feminism
#Rubem Alves
#strike
#pregnancy
#racial capitalism
#Reconstruction