Helen Hester: After Work: What's Left and Who Cares?

SERIES 2.2: POST-CAPITALISM 22 FEB: HELEN HESTER (UNIVERSITY OF WEST LONDON): AFTER WORK: WHAT'S LEFT AND WHO CARES? In this talk, I will explore how ideas regarding gender come to be filtered through the categories of work and technology, and consider what this might indicate the boundaries of contemporary post-work politics. Within post-work thinking, I want to argue, gendered forms of labour – and, indeed, gender itself – are frequently positioned as recalcitrant, obstinate, and ultimately untransformable. In texts outlining political programmes or activist ideas, we frequently find that gendered reproductive labour (including, most obviously, cooking, cleaning, and caring, but also things like subsistence farming, biological reproduction, and sex work) is forgotten or otherwise excluded, whilst in critical responses to these texts, we find it repeatedly pointed to as a constitutive limit with little attempt to address the questions it raises. I’m going to reflect upon this lacuna, and consider why some forms of technopolitical thinking appear unable to incorporate certain forms of gendered work within their transformative projects. Bio: Helen Hester is Head of Film and Media at the University of West London. Her research interests include technofeminism, sexuality studies, and theories of social reproduction, and she is a member of the international feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks. She is the author of Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), the co-editor of the collections Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism (Ashgate, 2015) and Dea ex Machina (Merve, 2015), and series editor for Ashgate’s ‘Sexualities in Society’ book series