Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
International Gender Studies in Turkey Conference, İstanbul, Türkiye, 9 - 10 Aralık 2023, ss.34-35
This paper focuses on the accounts of three worker subjects from urban Turkey, a domestic worker, a
sex worker, and a freelance culture worker, to understand the role of affect in the complex interplay
between precarization and commoning. We look at this interplay from a feminist perspective, register
the “feminine” qualities of affective labor and analyze how capitalism makes worker subjects
vulnerable by instrumentalizing affect. A feminist rethinking of the origins of capitalism
demonstrates that women’s everyday unpaid and invisible labor, including providing care, love and
affection to their partners, lovers, elderly and children, is “the rock upon which society is built”
(Federici 2010). Similarly, in care-related forms of paid work, the worker mobilizes their body’s
affective capacity to produce exchange value in the capitalist marketplace.We discuss the
post-industrial conditions of precarization through affective exploitation, as well as the emergent
networks of commoning that challenge these conditions. We observe how our three study
participants activate the affirmative potential of affective labor, transform how they perceive
themselves and their relationship to others, and become political subjects. To explore the possibilities
of living labor that exceeds dead labor, and that capital fails to capture and domesticate, we draw on
the work of Marx, Cvetkovich, Hardt & Negri, Linebaugh, Federici, Butler, Lorey, among others,
and argue that we can overcome isolation and individualization imposed by neoliberal capitalism if
we discover the “common notions” that make us simultaneously vulnerable and powerful. We argue
that a domestic worker, a sex worker and a freelance culture worker, who look very different at first
sight, have a lot in common -- not just problems, troubles, but also desires and a shared will to create
another world. The latter engenders a non-capitalist ethic and common forms of solidarity, creating
alternatives to capitalism’s models of the family, corporation, nation –social institutions that embody
the corrupt forms of the common.