“Other Kinds of Problems”

This chapter opens with the arrival of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a Bolivian labor activist who emerged as the standard-bearer for Third World women frustrated by US feminists’ efforts to define the IWY agenda. Although organizers of both the intergovernmental conference and the NGO tribune had hoped to put “politics” aside in order to focus on “women’s issues,” Barrios de Chungara articulated powerful reminders that the two remained inextricably intertwined. Tribune discussions returned to the question of how women’s domestic labor burdens limited women’s opportunities, although discussions frequently turned to condemnations of Augusto Pinochet’s government in Chile. Those stressing Third World concerns, whether about human rights or about subsistence labor, argued that the issues highlighted by US feminists, particularly around reproductive rights and sexual liberation, distracted from more compelling concerns.

Workplace Surveillance

In order to increase efficiency, measure productivity, decrease risk, and generally maximize profits, many private enterprises monitor their employees. While “workplace surveillance,” a term used interchangeably with “employee monitoring” (Ball, 2010, p. 88) is an age-old practice, its contemporary methods in the United States have their roots in the transformation of the workforce in the mid-19th to early 21st centuries. When laborers began moving to cities to sell their time for wages, the focus of work and the workplace shifted from subsistence labor on farms to hourly and salaried work in the factories of the industrial revolution. Business in the United States turned into “big business;” at the end of the 19th century, as the railroads expanded their organizational reach, merchants with localized shops and market knowledge had to merge in order to remain competitive in a growing market. The mergers did not produce uniform organizational units automatically, and the modes of production and accounting within the combined company were often in disarray (Saval, 2014, p. 38). Once the production of goods and the methods of their transit exceeded the slower, human pace of labor, a control crisis emerged for employers who suddenly needed to process much more information to keep up with the industrial pace of production (Beniger, 1989, p. 169). The pressing question became: what structures and technologies can ensure efficiency and integrity in the organization of business and labor (Zureik, 2003, p. 48)? The innovations in information processing and communication technologies that developed to address this question were mainly directed at managing workers (Beniger, 1989, p. 169).

Geographies of Intimacy in Mary Wilkins Freeman's Short Fiction

Situated within late nineteenth-century economic changes that transformed rural and urban spaces, Mary Wilkins Freeman's regionalist fiction imagines rural female-centered communities that I define as queer. Unlike emergent urban-centered gay and lesbian social formations, these communities are alienated from both normative reproduction and capitalist accumulation and are sustained by subsistence labor.