Working Fictions: Race, Gender, and Sexuality at Work

Catalog description

Eight hours a day. Five days a week. Such is the standard work week the world over, but what exactly is the “work” we do during these hours? What work happens beyond these hours? What does and does not count as work and why? How is work differently configured along lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, and dis/ability? In order to address these questions, we will trouble imaginaries of “free” labor through attention to enslaved and indentured labor, reproductive and sex work, and migrant and gig work in a global economy. From Herman Melville’s satire, “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” to Karl Marx’s and Adam Smith’s theories of labor, to workplace films like Jeanne Dielman and Office Space, this course explores representations of work in its diverse and ubiquitous forms, spanning the age of colonialism to our contemporary global division of labor.