The Relevance of “Women’s Work”

In the ongoing debates about the role of immaterial labor in digital media economics, the work of feminist researchers into affective labor performed in the home—“women’s work”—has barely featured. This article is an attempt to address this gap in the dominant framework for discussing consumer labor in digital contexts. It draws on feminist frameworks, particularly the work of Fortunati, in arguing that affective, immaterial labor has a variable and often indirect relationship to capitalist exchange. This indirect relationship allows the products of such work to retain their use-values while nevertheless remaining implicated in systems of exchange. This in turn draws attention to the immaterial product of reproductive labor, which is the social order itself, and the importance of the disciplining function of reproductive labor.