Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Program
Comparative Literature
Advisor
Eric Lott
Committee Members
John Brenkman
Peter Hitchcock
Subject Categories
African American Studies | American Literature | Comparative Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Keywords
Contemporary Literature, American Studies, Marxism, Feminism
Abstract
Genres of Labor identifies and explores a little-acknowledged fact about labor—that it appears to us in highly conventionalized forms that are subject to evaluation, appraisal, and interpretation. I call this appearance the “aesthetic” dimension of labor, and I show how it increasingly comes into view in the period since 1973, as a contracting economy pushes off work onto unwaged realms of human activity. In chapters on Andy Warhol’s The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), and Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001), I demonstrate that literary texts participate in an aesthetic contest over what qualifies as labor by experimenting with genre and form as they seek to document work, represent devaluation, or contest invisibility. Drawing lessons from Marxist feminism and the Black Radical Tradition, I argue that these texts frame the social fact of uncompensated labor as a block in perceptibility, suggesting that a set of economic relations come together to obstruct us from seeing the value inherent in the work of women, racialized peoples, and artists.
Recommended Citation
Jensen, Martin A., "Genres of Labor: Wageless Work and the Aesthetics of Stagnation" (2023). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5446
Included in
African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, Comparative Literature Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons