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Daisy Pitkin
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Moreover, she was willing to talk about the method as a method. You and Alma clearly have a strong bond, she said. She trusts you. Which, she went on to explain, is the only purpose of the questionnaire, or “pink sheet,” as HERE’s system of gaining these personal stories from workers and then recording and sharing them among staff is called. The question set that apparently helps to evoke the stories had at one point been printed on pink paper. The sheets were no longer pink—at least not the ones I saw—but the questions and the method remained the same.
In theory, the pink sheet is a process for building bonds with workers, for gaining their trust in a way that is teachable and reproducible, so that organizers can be trained how to do it. She said that she imagined that I had gained your trust by sharing with you things about my life and then listening while you confided in me in return. That’s all it is, she said, and then described with great solemnity that HERE, under the guidance of its director, has figured out how to train organizers to identify and tell their most important and compelling personal story so that workers will open up to them and share their own most important personal stories. We record them in a database, she said, so that we remember them, and, yes, so we can share them with each other, so that when a campaign gets hard, we know what motivates each worker, and we can push them through their fear.
urgh
That same March, in 2011, one of Clara Lemlich Shavelson’s daughters was in New York, attending a commemoration of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire and a ceremony in which thirty women were receiving awards named after her mother. At these events, she kept getting approached by people offering their condolences for the tragic way her mother had died—in the Triangle fire, they said—which was confusing to her since her mother did not work at the Triangle factory and, in fact, had lived a very long time. She died in her sleep in 1982 at ninety-six at the Jewish Home for the Aged in Los Angeles, where she had recently helped the staff form a union.
lmao
In 2020, industrial laundry workers made $10.13 an hour on average, while the CEO of the largest laundry corporation in the United States made $9,778,369. This is a typical disparity in today’s economy, in which more is owned by fewer people than at any point in US history, and in which unions have collapsed: union density has fallen to 6.4 percent in the private sector, around 11 percent overall, similar to the percentage it was in 1900, when the ILGWU was formed. These numbers form a telling equation. Since union density fell below 25 percent in 1977, income inequality has risen exponentially every year. In fact, the only years in our entire history in which the share of income held by the top 10 percent declined are years when union density was above 27 percent, from 1942 to 1973.
I’ve come to think of solidarity, this mixture of hope and care, as a physical force or maybe a force field, and as such it invisibly acts on all things that are passing through it at all times. It’s the space between bodies that are marching or singing or striking or otherwise taking action together. Maybe you’ve felt it, at a protest or on a picket line. I’ve heard people say that it feels like church. It’s the way bodies, our bodies, working collectively, change the properties of the space between them. It’s the most important thing.
Merve Emre presents the stories of her interviewees as evidence that all reproduction is, and should be, assisted, not “natural.” But these stories are equally proof of just how hard it is to give up nature as an object of desire. Even queer theorists are sobered to learn the sex of an embryo. So when Emre proposes we expose the lie of nature, I’m not so sure. I’m alienated by the discourse around the natural, sure, but only the same way I’m alienated by the skinny white girls with dead eyes and bare midriffs who herald, like dandelions, the arrival of summer in New York City. Unfold my political critique at its creases, and you will be left with nothing but flat, blank envy. That doesn’t mean nature isn’t a lie. It just means that we never believed in it because it was true; we believed in it because we wanted to.
This is my way of saying what I think Emre means when she writes, “people’s bodies are unruly sites for politics.” It’s an observation she makes of micha cárdenas’s Pregnancy (2009), to which it applies if only by accident. cárdenas does indeed perform the ambivalence of reproduction, but not without arming herself with political buzzwords clearly intended to pack a moral punch. “oh the privilege of / cis-hetero reproduction!” the poet exclaims, a laptop sticker of a line sure to win righteous snaps from the mostly cisgender queers who are spending their Tuesday night at this independent bookstore in Oakland. I prefer Joanne Spataro, who longs in the New York Times to make a baby with her trans fiancée “the way fertile cisgender people do.” She makes no attempt to justify this desire politically. She wouldn’t be able to, anyway.
love her writing
About three years ago a funny quip began circulating on social media that the gig economy was now mostly composed of Mommy apps. Business Insider suggested that twenty-something techbros were wasting their talents designing technologies and programs for things they wished their Mommies still did for them: driving, cooking, cleaning, laundering. Newsweek even ran a similar story under the headlines read “Silicon Valley Needs Moms.” The term “post-mom economy” emerged to capture this particular moment in tech(bro) culture when Uber (“Mommy, drive me”), TaskRabbit (“Mommy, clean my room”), GrubHub (“Mommy, I’m hungry”), and LiveBetter (“Mommy, I’m bored”) emerged. But to suggest that these apps are designed to replace Mommy misses a key point. These services do not replicate, reproduce, or replace Mommy. Instead, they extend the maternal mandate to all other care providers and expand the realm of consumption. The labor associated with Mommy merely attaches to new bodies and figures not usually associated with Mommy, while the goods and services associated with Mommy’s care expand. In other words, the issue with Mommy is not just who is doing this labor, but the demands for this sort of labor in society.
Thus they reveal a problem that goes beyond a matter of gender and diversity in the tech world. The classed and heteronormative obsession with work–life balance, efficiency, and time management displayed by Mommy’s-basement apps suggest that one can escape patriarchy or gendered labor in an instant—one just needs the right app! But this propaganda obscures the inescapable realities of care work that so many women, people of color, and precarious workers undertake out of survival. A Mommy’s-basement world forecloses the possibility of a reconfigured technological future that is not based on exploiting the labor of others. And it co-opts the political potential of care as a category of feminist organizing.
Mommy’s-basement apps are telling in that they reveal that misogyny and racism in the tech industry will not be solved by diversity-based hiring and the inclusion of women alone. Scholars such as Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts, and Marie Hicks have done important work in highlighting how the history of technology and technological designs are deeply implicated in upholding racism and misogyny. We might add Mommy’s basement to this mix. That these apps emerge out of Mommy’s basement can explain why the classed labor of gig work seems to escape recognition. Because it is Mommy’s devalued labor, it can be packaged and sold as labor not worth doing oneself. Because it is Mommy’s otherwise devalued labor, it has been repackaged and sold to prospective gig workers as an enterprising and innovative system of assembling and modulating work rather than old-school care labor.
None of this will be corrected by the current frantic wave of inclusion in the world of tech. That is too often just about showing good face. It is not enough. This is not to say that tech is not full of subversive actors who are organizing and pushing for a more equitable technological future. The industry is not a monolithic enterprise full of only techbros—but the future depends on more than representation, it depends on designing media environments that are aware of the social and how the social is reproduced through care. Accounting for gender and diversity in the tech industry means contending with the normative regimes of care built into our technologies. It is not enough to remedy the fact that women are being sexually harassed at Uber. Something altogether different and better than Uber must also be created. Mommy’s basement has been and will continue to be a coveted venue for misogyny. But those who dwell in Mommy’s basement can also be evicted. The first step is to serve notice that the rent owed Mommy is overdue.
love it
It might seem that Bruder’s protagonists have fallen through the cracks of the system, but this would be the wrong way to think about it. In the absence of a robust social program, this is the system: they work for our parks; they take advantage of policing protocols that tacitly allow white elders to sleep in parking lots; they live partially on whatever Social Security income they have; and they work for huge government-subsidized companies such as Amazon that are at the forefront of our new economy. They are scraping together work in a “gig economy” that affords them precious few protections and resources, while calling upon all of their creativity and strength. They are at the bleeding edge of neoliberal consolidation, and the only difference between them and their children might be that they can remember a time when they were promised something different.
May especially is a force of nature, and she refuses to define herself as a woman in decline or as the victim of a fraying U.S. experiment. Like many of Bruder’s subjects, she prefers to see herself as a pioneer in the forging of a new American dream. While we should not romanticize her plight, we should not pity her either. She and her peers gather around quasi-utopian communities, online and in deserts, devoted to anti-consumerist values. They create shadow economies of books and techniques; they forge new friendships and they fall in love. They have, in other words, much to give—and one suspects we are all worse off because so much of that energy is spent living precariously and under exploitative working conditions. Nomadland is, in the end, a book about the creation of new kinds of life amidst the wreckage of economic exclusion. For May, economic depression can be an opportunity for reinvention, and for the recovery of forms of freedom and community undercut by an exhausted capitalism.