Mules of the World Unbridled: Race, Labor, and the Political Economy of Twentieth-Century American Women of Color's Writing

Abstract

Audre Lorde, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Anzaldua and Leslie Marmon Silko have all so far been read as valuable theorists of race, gender and/or sexuality—but they have not yet been read as theorists of labor, and that is precisely what my project does. My project demonstrates that reading their work as labor texts is not a merely creative or imaginative enterprise, but actually portrays something that critical definitions of labor, and the labor movement (including theory), has historically elided: the limits to epistemology, as they have so far been conceived, are a result of taking seriously only patriarchal definitions labor. This limits our understanding of labor, and thus, limits possibilities for human labor in all its fullness. If the field of labor theory were to encompass the insights about women's labor (both explicit and implicit) embedded in these working class women of color's work, it would expand productively to show the fullness of human labor—and its possibilities. The dominant reading of labor misses the productively dialectical relationship between working class women of color's artistic-philosophical production and labor itself. My project demonstrates the ways in which my chosen authors illuminate the limits of epistemology thus far. I assert that the category of women's labor must include waged, unwaged, reproductive, creative, emotional, artistic, and intellectual labors; and I argue that these should be considered together because they are all ultimately productive of the same thing, which is culture—that is, ideology in its material and immaterial forms, and, ultimately, an ontological order that describes and hierarchizes ourselves and our surroundings. I mean, that, for example, a chair, which is a product of labor, is an ideological instrument in that it orders our relation to our sensuous external environment—but also orders our relations with each other, as we are forcibly oriented to our social environment as well. I argue that, much like a chair, in this way, literary “products” like poems and novels are equivalently ideological mechanisms, and as such, analyzing and describing them in terms of the labor that went into them is a productive—and oft-overlooked—way of understanding our ideological surrounds. In short, all these forms of women's labor, which may at first seem to be disparate types, are equivalently functionally productive of a world, which is a particular type of world, in which certain things are possible and others are not; time and causality appear to flow only in a particular way. In short, it is a world that is delimited by ideology. Thus, the specific purpose of my focusing on the full spectrum of all of these different types of labor of women of color, working-class women and queer women, is to demonstrate the ways in which these women have always been making our world—and yet, their ontological and epistemological contributions still remain outside academic and popular cultural recognition.