Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Being attentive to the everyday lives of women workers allows us to (re)visibilize layers of activist strategies and opens up opportunities to learn from the unique ways in which they mobilize.

Paper long abstract

Being attentive to the everyday lives of women workers allows us to (re)visibilize layers of activist strategies and opens up opportunities to learn from the unique ways in which they mobilize. Through extensive fieldwork with women labour organizers and workers in Bangladesh, I explored the ways in which activist belonging was continuously cultivated and how these strategies mimicked the activities of social reproduction. Building on the materialist reading of affect (Hennessy, 2009, 2013; Hardy and Cruz, 2019), dissident friendships (Chowdhury and Philipose, 2016), and communities of care (Francisco-Menchavez, 2018; Tungohan 2023), and situating these concepts and frameworks within scholarship on class consciousness and social reproduction, I show that women’s organizing experiences highlight the importance of activating the communities that women embed themselves in – be it biological, friendship or other fictive kinship – for the development of class consciousness and sense of belonging with workers. I argue that just as social reproductive labour is the necessary and invisibilized counterpart to productive labour, the mundane, everyday, affective organizing is the necessary and invisibilized counterpart to women’s labour activism and the building of a community of activists. These theoretical insights were developed, in part, because of a methodological commitment to the critical ethnographic tradition, one vested in generating analytical frameworks from marginalized, yet creative agents of change. The various methods I adopted – in particular, participant observation, site visits, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews – were selected to learn from, and for, women workers and organizers organizing for social change.