Gender, Race, and Class through the Lens of Labor

 https://youtu.be/zGXIZVI3PH8?si=-vXoq62x7lacshI7

~~ recommended by collectivist action ~~

Nancy Fraser: Benjamin Lecture 1 - Gender, Race, and Class through the Lens of Labor

June 14th – Gender, Race, and Class through the Lens of Labor: A Post-Intersectional Analysis of Capitalist Society In these dark times, many who remain committed to social justice sense the need to think big. Dissatisfied with single-issue, identity-based campaigns, they seek larger political paradigms that connect the disparate concerns and dispersed struggles of multiple movements. The term “intersectionality,” hugely popular among feminists and anti-racists, is one important marker of this aspiration. This lecture aims to advance that integrative project. Returning to large-scale social theorizing, I propose an account of capitalist society that discloses the hidden ties between gender, race, and class. These I trace through the lens of labor, broadly conceived. Departing from received understandings, I argue that capitalist society relies on three analytically distinct types of labor. The first and most familiar is exploited labor, performed by free workers in exchange for wages in for-profit enterprises. Often equated with labor as such and, thus, with “the working class,” exploited labor would not be possible, or profitable, absent the two other types: expropriated labor – unpaid or under-paid and coercively extracted from unfree or dependent subjects who are usually racialized; and the externalized labor of care or social reproduction – chronically undervalued, often invisible, and largely performed by women. By theorizing the entwinement in capitalist society of these “three faces of labor,” this lecture suggests a way of thinking gender, race, and class together, within a common frame.