The Digital Economy of the Sourdough: Housewifisation in the
Time of COVID-19
Julianna Faludi* and Michelle Crosby**
*Corvinus University of
Budapest, Budapest, Hungary, faludisociology@gmail.com, www.juliannafaludi.com
**Corvinus University of
Budapest, Budapest, Hungary, michelleo.crosby@gmail.com
Abstract: The most brilliant part of re-visiting
Engels, were the stark reminders, sometimes paragraph by paragraph, of key,
essential truths that remain valid today in 2020 regarding new (perhaps old,
but now more visible) forms of housewifisation, unto which SARS-CoV2 has shown
a mirror to every person who has ever concerned themselves with gender
in-balance, lay person to expert. This paper is about justifying those claims
as essential truths by drawing modern parallels and also intends to generate a
discussion on the form of the family and societal organisation which would
support human flourishing, regardless of gender by formulating a new,
post-COVID gender order.
Keywords: housewifisation,
digital economy, exploitation, Engels,
SARS-CoV2
Acknowledgement: The authors acknowledge the reviewers of
the first drafts of this paper affiliated with the Karl Polányi Research
Institute, and the editor of the special edition of tripleC.
This paper takes under scrutiny the new forms of
exploitation and housewifisation in digital capitalism in the context of the
pandemic-lockdowns. The home office has overturned what we know and think about
digital work, as the workplace has been replaced to homes, along with several
functions, like schooling and social services being provided beforehand by the
state and market structures. It is not the Internet economy that exploits
people related to the restrictions, it went further, people take on the burden
of the state, the costs of schooling etc., while the state enforces and extends
its surveillance to monitor the communication and the location of people.
From a theoretical perspective, this has implications on at least two
levels: we need to reconsider where we place the role of the state, the role of
the exchange value of goods, and the role of money in this economic circuit as
forms of alienation. Furthermore, we need to understand the role of digital
labour and the shifting societal division of labour. Public spending cuts have
been visible in the budgeting of policy programmes, but domestic work has been
always just estimated due to a lack of systematic data being gathered on the
national level. The outsourcing of schooling and social services along with the
home office has created a new trend of housewifisation. Mies (1982; 1986) found that homeworkers
were superexploited, denied social security, and often poor. Her study of lace
makers in India revealed that homeworkers who were producing lace in a putting-out
system were paid low wages based on the ideology of the housewife, which
legitimised the superexploitation of women at home with wages below the
subsistence level (Mies 1982). According to Mies’s (1986) theory the rise of capitalism under patriarchy,
capital sees women, nature, and the colonies as standing outside of civilised society and therefore treats them
as cheap sources of value. Mies (1986, 112-116) argues
that in the 19th and 20th centuries the construction of
the housewife went through two main stages: first the creation of the women of
the accumulating classes who consume luxury goods and as bourgeois housewives
are agents of consumption. And second, proletarian women who became the
“colony” of white men . They labour in the nuclear family. Only the class of
the wealthy could afford to have a family. The
bourgeoisie declared “family a
private territory in contrast to the ‘public’ sphere of economic and political
activity” (Mies 1986, 104) . Prügl (1996,
115) a decade later in an empirical work explored different socio-economic
contexts from the perspective of colonisation and confirms that women defined
as housewives “have become the optimal flexible labour force”.
Today, the housewife is represented with the image of the
sourdough-bread baking woman. The load of unpaid work and waged labour has
grown, and advances the self-exploitation of the “housewife”.
Since contemporary societies have love-driven, and interest-driven
marriages in their diverse forms, we need to look at the institution of
marriage and other forms of cohabitation from the perspective of: 1) economic
organisation as a driving force behind these institutions; and 2) institutional
evolution itself. Institutional evolution implies that cohabitation exists in
society in one given time period as a heritage of previous times, when given
forms have emerged and established themselves, as well as new forms that emerge
organically in the given era, but are being perceived as innovations, thus not
being wide-spread and are being tied to some social groups within the society.
Engels
in his work on The Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State (1891a) tied the
place of sexuality in the society to two essential drivers. The
changing environment, such as the extinction
of the huge mammals due to over-hunting, created disruptions within the
communities. Hunting communities of people had to be segmented to smaller
groups in order to survive. Male-dominance emerged by males taking control over
organising symbolic rituals around the resource-provision from females. Thus,
changing conditions pushed people to economic re-organisation, and to
re-arrange their customs that affected the
modes of reproduction. New instruments of production had to be created for
survival, and this technological advancement was tied to the reshuffling of
social relations of humans. Biological entities that went through a natural
evolution, had been pushed to civilising themselves into a culture of private
property and domesticated sex with one partner – forming a household,
also known as paired marriage.
In the longer term, this shift commodified the marital status. Exchange of the “female”
in return for economic benefits, added
exchange value – the bride price – to females being bought from their
families. The commodification of women for creating heritage and wealth in the
long run, and rendering marriage itself into the market domain – went a long
way, and was present during the processes of industrialisation and the birth of
capitalism. The pre-condition for class societies to emerge was the creation of
forms of oppression, where monogamy – one-sided as being expected mostly from
women – was a tool to break community surveillance and (sisterhood) solidarity
to give way to competition and appropriation of wealth and resources. The
institution of private property is at the core of dissolving communities – a
law of Marxist logic that is also valid for intimacy, and the “privatising”
process of human sexuality, and privatisation of intimacy has creeped
along during modernisation.
For example, forms
of cohabitation might be tied to social class, but in contemporary societies,
the liberalisation of the legitimised forms goes along with the conservative
de-legitimation process of the variations of cohabitation. Marriage and
diversity of sexuality have become a commodity deployed by political elites
enforcing agendas within the socio-political domain. This can be seen as a
political enforcement rather than an economic one, given that the aim is not
purposefully creating efficient economic organising – think of what the
household as an economic unit meant for the market and the state in the mid-
and late 20th century. The aim of political commodification of forms of
cohabitation and individual sexuality is the creation of a stable electoral
base in the short and mid-term, and the creation of content for feeding the
masses. In this regard it is no less than the creation of other thematic content within the political social-mediatised
communication. Sexuality and cohabitation have left the private domain. The
life of people living together could remain in the private zone only for
a shorter period of time, and mostly in urbanised and
economically prospering geographical areas. This does not imply that these
spheres have not been controlled domains before, but the trends of loosening
the social norms around sexuality and then pulling them back just to create a
social discourse to feed the content-driven public is a phenomenon of the 21st
century. Sexuality – such as sexual preferences of the individual or the
structure of families and the role of women –
are a political commodity that thematises public discourse
on sexuality in the media and on social media in the context of digital
capitalism and social media society.
Another example is the
notion of “content is king” – attributed to Bill Gates in 1996 (published on
the website of Microsoft[1]),
described precisely in the advent of today’s era that the Internet belonging to
communities and people for free-gazing would become soon a marketplace for
commodities such as content. By content Bill Gates meant entertainment that can
reach out to a vast audience with zero marginal costs and can be duplicated as
much as one likes. News magazines would be structured around interactivity – an
increased number of clicks and chat discussions – and defined by content in a
way that print would never be able to.
Sexuality has come across
multiple commodification processes, where the final stage is the marketplace
for partners, the culture of swiping images of potential dates, being referred
to as swiping culture. This can be linked to various motivations, such as
finding a long-term partner, but mostly it serves the “hookup culture” of casual
dating that is organised with the help of platforms and apps such as Tinder.
Hookup culture has been around since the 1920s, but social media platforms
accelerate the encounters individuals might have within a limited time span, by
serving a present need of individuals – young women and men – not looking for a
stable relationship due to plans of studying, working, etc.
In digital capitalism, time is
commodified by the attention-deficit economy. Visibility is turned into an
added value of the persona – the public social media image of the individual.
Dating platforms have converted the individuals into “hunters” deploying the
benefits of swiping and hooking up with a broad number of available targets,
while these hunters themselves are not recognising the commodification of their
own sexualised image. Capitalist platforms such as Tinder, Bumble, or Hinge are
ripping the economic benefits of this exchange.
Distancing and the severe
border-lockdowns across countries, regions and districts has separated some couples
and locked other couples unexpectedly in one space. The COVID-economy on the
one hand enhanced porn-consumption[2]
that was fuelled by the availability of free-content provided by some of the
platforms, like Pornhub (Mestre-Bach et al. 2020),
and changed the dating habits and intimate relations on the other hand (Dewitte et al. 2020). According to Seidman, the
boss of the largest dating social media platform Tinder[3], lockdown has brought an
increase in swipes with a “dramatic shift in behaviour metrics”, but falling
subscriptions to the premium services of the app. Virtual dating became popular
on platforms like eHarmony, OKCupid and Match supporting video dating options, pushing
Tinder to expand its services for organising dating events online rather than
serving offline dating matches. Dating apps in sum were reported growing and
becoming more virtual[4] as a
consequence, after the initial drop in subscribers but a rise in online
activity. The shifts in services, such as the passport function on Tinder, and
user behaviour also suggest that virtual meaningful connections became
important and more location agnostic compared to the previously experienced
fast matching. The longer-term effects of these changes are yet to be explored,
and it is not clear how virtual meaningful dating will shape behaviour in the
future, and if it has any impact on the traditional or now-known institutions
of cohabitation and the geography of matching. What can be seen is that the
conditions of physical distance, insecurity and alienation have brought
together some couples, yet further alienated others.
The economic organisation as a
driving force behind the creation of the households was and is a persistent
model, with some degree of shift in the centrality of the household to the
larger economy of firms. In primitive communism
however, human reproduction was driven by sexuality, and in Engels’ view
allowed for parity of the sexes. He supports Bachofen’s assertion that the
shift from mother-right to father-right downgraded status of women: “women, who, as mothers, were the only
definitely ascertainable parents of the younger generation, were treated with a
high degree of consideration and respect, which, according to Bachofen's
conception, was enhanced to the complete rule of women (gynaecocracy)” (Engels 1891b, 205). Sisterhood and
solidarity among women, and among men would create large families, and save
individuals from domestic or sexual violence. Social norms were under close
scrutiny within the community, especially when the institution of abolishing
incest emerged. Power did not break societies into classes yet, as the main
function of the community was not accumulation of wealth but rather human
reproduction. Contemporary societies that are shaped by digital capitalism in
the social media age do not focus on biological human reproduction but on
capital accumulation mediated by digital technologies.
Modern families have found themselves locked in their homes in a
family structure that turned out to be efficient and dysfunctional at the same
time in so many ways. Stories about the obstacles in meeting extramarital dates, reports about increased home-abuse, and the
increased tendency of divorce have drawn attention
to the dysfunctions of the persistent structure. UN Women reported[5] that
there was a significant increase at least in 50% of the countries in reports to
the police, health centres, helplines after the outbreak of the COVID-19, in
other countries there was a decrease due to the restrictions in mobility.
Particularly vulnerable became women with disabilities or those who recovered
from COVID-19, and returning migrant women facing exclusion and stigmatisation
in the communities. Among the exacerbating factors are the isolation with the
abusers, security and money worries, and deserted public spaces.
Engels and Marx viewed the
transformation of relationships of genders and the family from the perspective
of social transformation and economic organisation. The industrial revolutions
tore men from their families, that as a consequence reinforced the gendered
division of labour in households. Expanding the view on families in the context
of the social changes and the complex economic transit of the COVID-19 economy,
relationship patterns are defined by the accelerated digitalisation processes
and the collision of the public ad privat -social spaces in the home.
Households became central, and families became the
sole functional economic unit for filling in the gap
imposed by the state (schooling, social services, healthcare) efficiently only
in cases where a more equalising division of labour has occurred in the
household. A report from Turkey[6]
suggests that men’s unpaid work time went up
nearly five-fold during the lockdown, especially among those who switched to
the home office. The increased demand for household production and caring
labour has brought a necessity of participation of most family members. Yet
women were still performing four times more unpaid work than men.
A survey[7] (Weissbourd et al. 2020) found that fathers felt closer
to their children during the lockdown, across race and class in the US. An
analysis conducted in the UK conducted in March and April 2020 revealed that
fathers reported to do 58% more childcare work than normally (ONS
2020). The report also reveals that fathers would need more flexible
working arrangement for participating more in childcare, and that they feel
their jobs would be more threatened than women’s when asking for remote working
solutions at their workplaces.
Shifting towards the home as the central
economic system generated increased demand for
housework on women as there was a need to create a space for childcare provided by men. Thus, men were more prone to take over childcare time from
women than performing housework. Still, the increase of time spent by men on
childcare is a trend to consider when thinking about the new family structure.
Yet, we argue that these processes may create a deepening mediatised
“housewifisation” since “old institutions” still prevail. Mies (1986) sees housewifisation as the devaluation of women’s
unpaid and underpaid work, as an underlying accumulation model of the
capitalist world economy.
As an illustration of the persisting
old institutions that may prevail in the forms of tradition in society are
rituals or customs being followed in the framework of the ceremony in the
offline domain. Engels placed the marriage by capture in the evolution of
marital relationships at a time when gender-based dominance was about to
emerge, but matrilineal households still persisted. He writes,
“the abduction of women
reveals even here a trace of the transition to monogamy – at least in the form
of the pairing marriage” (Engels 1891a, 155). The
man who lead the ritual of capturing a woman from the other group – either to
avoid incest, or to perform dominance over the others – would have the woman
for himself after ceasing her. What is described there is a gang rape, where
the males of the “hunting” group would demonstrate their dominance over her
body. Engels places this custom in the era which he describes as one where
women were leaders and respected within the community. But what is not
mentioned is that the respected role of leadership was given to in-group
females in power-position.
The tradition of “stealing the bride” or ”snatching the bride” or
kidnapping the bride in some Eastern-European cultures such as Hungary and in
the Caucasus is connected to the above described ritual. Molodikova (2013) found that these traditions are still a social
reality. The stories of the brides reveal their oppressed status that defines
the course of their lives as being forced into marriage and motherhood instead
of pursuing their studies, etc.
Some rituals from the times of the marriage by capture have remained
until today just like inheritance that for many is until today almost the only
way to accumulate wealth. These are structures that have been persisting since
the times of the industrial revolutions (Piketty 2013).
In pre-class communal societies oppression and arrangement of people into
classes came about as a necessity to adapt and to develop new instruments of
production. How to adopt to the new challenges today faced by families, and who
are the families that we are talking about is yet a question to understand in
the wake of the crises since “old institutions” that emphasise self-protection
from the market can still be observed.
Communist households that include multiple generations living in the
same house can be found in Hungary and other Central and Eastern European
countries. This is known as “ket-generacio” or “two-generation”.
Multi-generation households in the US are perceived as being traditionally
reserved to the poor; most probably persons of colour, especially the working
class and immigrants, precisely for their protective benefits. Two-generation
homes are sometimes coupled with another protection from the market, the
Hungarian “homestead”, which includes a rich garden – essentially a fully
functioning farm with peach trees, fig trees, grapes, tomatoes, chicken, a
turkey, other kinds of fowl and domestic farm animals. During Hungarian State
Socialism, families used these self-sustaining homesteads as a mechanism
against food insecurity and shortages.
Making bread and yogurt in-house, filling cases with kolbasz and even
distilling palinka is in Hungary a symbol of pride and self-sufficiency. It is
done on top of the care work that is primarily conducted and coordinated by
women. To make each household its own factory, rather to outsource or engage
with outside places of exchange, requires full-time workers and traditionally
large families. COVID-19 re-legitimised these practices similar to the way a
“reserve army”’ is justified in war-time contingency plans.
In primitive communism, women had
strong bonds to exercise power over non-cooperative males. The family was a
place where work was shared among the members of the family, the division of
labour was a functional one and inherent to the community. That was the point
in human history when oppression among individuals was not yet systemic.
Marxism sees the family as one of the fundamental units of capitalism, due to
its economic unit role, as well as its reproductive role. Engels writes: “The social institutions under which men
of a definite historical epoch and of a definite country live are determined by
both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour, on the one
hand, and of the family, on the other” (Engels 1891a,
132).
Instead of the image of women being captured
and ravaged by friends of her captor, ripped from her tribe, women’s role today is more
pleasantly re-framed as superwoman. Superwoman, an icon of power, superiority
and strength, is frequently referenced as a symbol of female potential, but
most importantly presents society’s expectations of paired females.
Essentially, there are women who volunteer for self-exploitation, defined as
the institutionalised slavery of women in the monogamous paired family. The
Superwoman Syndrome is a mythical ideal of women inside monogamous paired
marriage. The content of the superwoman ideology is that women perform
fantastic feats that are posted on social media. This ideology is the carcass
upon which the eating machine, the digital economy, both feasts and gains
momentum. Women desire to be seen as heroes, “doing it all”. A friend remarked:
“I am happy with the shift to digitalisation because then I’ll be able to teach
and go to conferences when the children are sick”.
The digitalised household economy is the combination of
home-office, home-schooling, and social media image-construction of the
individuals. This imposes new roles: those of the “civilised” world out there:
family members become co-workers and the home becomes a co-working space and
school. Children and parents become students and teachers. Roles that were
outsourced to “society” to be provided mostly by the state. These roles became
controlled by the framework regulated by the state/ employer outside
regulations, and being outsourced to be enforced within the family. The
division of labour in the family is imposed by external structures and enforced
by the internal split of roles. Alienation spreads from work to home now that
workplaces spread into the digitialised household. Alienation has grown to an
unprecedented level. The COVID-19 lockdown advanced alienation in the home. A
state-enforced family-orchestration pushed families to take on education,
healthcare and social services that had been delegated from state-provision to
families. Child-rearing as a process internalised to the nuclear family took on
an externalised function of education: distant and digital learning has left
families with home-schooling and forced parents to take over the school’s role
with external requirements that pupils have to comply with.
For the first time since industrialisation, the firm is not the central
unit of analysis, but rather society has gone back to its roots, to the
household. Presently, paid and unpaid labour lack the spatial divide they have
previously enjoyed, making female and male contributions (or the lack thereof)
more visible. During COVID-19, women were putting food into the oven for their
children's lunch with a computer on top of the toaster and the oven so that the
headset cord would stretch sufficiently while bending over during an online
meeting or webinar. Children completed their school lessons at the small table
in the kitchen. We were teaching the children, making money to buy food and the
electricity that powers our homes.
The blurring of private and
public spheres of life has been underway for some decades now (Dén-Nagy 2018). Among managers, to be
always available over and above the paid hours of employment is an expectation
and requirement for promotion. Since women of child bearing age perform the
majority of unpaid labour, they are not available for these additional hours of
unpaid paid labour. In addition, the
solution isn't a simple matter of her husband leaning in to the household duties, because he himself is occupied
with on-demand labour during non-working hours. While it is tempting to blame
institutions for such impositions, we must remember that bias is unconscious,
and it is men who control most positions of power in capitalist society so that
unpaid paid labour is a mechanism for female oppression that comes on top of
wage inequality that women face.
The distancing of individuals from collectives, i.e. individualisation, has also been a
generation-defined trend that has been worsening for some time. Communities that gave place to a looser structure of
neighbourhoods and atomised families, in the fifties and sixties drove people
further from affiliating with politics and turning toward civic organisations
and religious groups, as explained by Putnam (2000)
in the book Bowling Alone. In the
early-fifties Nisbet warned about the central state filling in the role of the
community if family, church or locality would not be able to fulfil the desires
of humans for community. The desire for community has been challenged by the
new form of alienation that has been labelled as social distancing in the
context of COVID-19 prevention.
Rituals of people-to-people interaction gave path to newly
emergent structures, and digital connection more than before is the key social
network of humans. The encounter with people one trusts in less distancing
encounters is in the pandemic crisis organised as a looser network of virtual
connections. There are many stories circulating about the lengthy virtual talks
and meetings bringing people closer under the lockdown, which is supported by
the shifts in the social and dating media usage behaviour. Digital means of
communication create virtual communities that are less defined by the locality,
while locality under lockdown and other restrictions of physical social
interaction narrows locality to the home and neighbourhood. Families are in
this context especially important for the organisation of belonging. The
structure and embeddedness of the contemporary family in society places
community in the backstage. Authority remains in the hands of the family and
reinforces the role of the state. Virtual communities are dispersed, and
not suitable for monitoring and ensuring social norms. The COVID-19 economy of
digital capitalism enhances state surveillance of individuals and the
alienation within families.
The loss of jobs, the shifting of jobs to the home and the
acceleration of shifting exchange onto digital platforms have implications for
the societal division of labour. Guest workers from Romania and Bulgaria were
flying to Germany and Austria to ensure that agricultural and food processing
production would continue and there was not disturbance of food supply on the
market. Workers forced to live in crowded spaces and work under conditions not in
compliance with the pandemic-safety considerations were most vulnerable to mass
infections, that was predictable from the beginning.
During the lock-down in spring 2020, some large organisations hiring
skilled labour transitioned to the Microsoft Teams platform, where
communications were inundated by notifications and pop-ups. In addition,
features allowed for time tracking and for a notification to appear when a certain
person “appears online”. A dialogue about abnormal expectations of synchronous
work started to emerge; namely, that one could not discharge their functions as
if the computer was simply moved from the office to the kitchen table. Toggling
between the old “unpaid” labour and “paid” labour, employers perhaps began to
panic that they were paying employees for “unpaid” work and started to increase
surveillance and monitoring. Furthermore, they no longer received the unpaid
paid labour that they previously enjoyed and that increased their profits
through what Marx terms absolute surplus value production – the lengthening of
the working day and of the increase of the amount of unpaid labour conducted
per day.
Marxism defines the private property that drives the
institution of the family as one of the core problems of inequalities within
society and in families. The abolition of the family as a quest of Marx
addressed a broader problem, it was a call for liberating individuals from
inequality and systematic oppression, as well as creating space for communities
that would represent a flattened structure of society. But what are the driving
forces behind virtual communities?
The outsourcing of schooling and social services along with
the home office has created a new housewifisation trend. Women baking sourdough
bread and posting images of it on Instagram during the COVID-19 lockdown are
symbols of this new phase of housewifisation. The lockdown has just highlighted
and reinforced how the economic circuit has become even more sophisticated in
producing meanings to goods that have become even more abstract.
Mies (1986, 103) argues that the domestication
and privatisation process of the housewife in the 19th century
fostered the construction of the image of the “good woman’. The COVID-19
lockdown confined women to the household where a set of housework chores had to
be performed. We argue that the images of home-baked bread trending on social
media during the time of the pandemic is a symbol of this contemporary
domestication process that creates a certain image of the good woman leveraging
between her paid and unpaid jobs. The privatised arena of consumption at home
is exposed to digital communities.
Home-baked bread, a
trend that swept across social media, sourdough and yeast have become scarce
commodities (along with toilet paper). The public presentation of the self was
recognised as being immanent to the capitalist mode of production (Read 2003) before the spread of social media in all
sectors of economic organisation. The economic circuit thus captures the
presentation of the self into a lock-in: images of a kind are being reproduced
by the users for various reasons to present the informed image of the self and
accumulate social capital. The trend of posting home-baked bread images online
was based on the logic of precarious labour. There was a boost the sales of
kits and packages designed for producing home-baked bread offered by bakers.
There were also tutorials and live streamings.
Yeast and flour shortage hit the
stores in March and April 2020 across the world. Bread is the symbol of
survival, hospitality, and abundance that is deeply rooted in history. It represents culture, the miracle of agriculture and human ability to
process grains, and cultivate sourdough or yeast to convert it into an edible
product. Rituals of celebration of bread are part of numerous traditions.
Civilisation is tied to the spread of organised agriculture, so is the rise of
paired marriages and the patriarchal family, and the beginning of serfdom of
women according to Engels. He writes, “Within the family he is
the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat” (Engels
1891a, 181). Bread-baking was an inherent part of housework, a
labour-intensive activity of the mother undertaken for feeding her family. With
the increased division of labour in industrial societies, bakers became
important players in the urban economy. Durkheim (1996; 1893)
uses the image of the baker for illustrating how different household tasks have
been taken over by newly emerging professions. Placing the bread back to the
homes was not just the result of the “slow”-branded economy, but a response to
the lockdown. The emerging community around home-based bread-baking was a
globalised way of transmitting meanings of locality, home, and community at the
time of the shock of the pandemic. The meaning of bread and the performing
proficiency of bread-baking were forms of demonstrating culinary capital and an
act of the social positioning of oneself (Easterbrook-Smith
2020). This also highlights how despite physical
localisation globalisation is unfolding in the enhanced digital reality of the
COVID-economy.
The competition of the home-bread beakers went along with proud images
of all types of home-baking and cooking that presented the meritocratic message
accomplishment. The processes of self-branding formalised by reality television
and enhanced by the social media according to Hearn (2016)
has intensified and
spread across the population at large.
Indeed, the popularity and ubiquity of social media seem to confirm the
centrality of socialized production, flexible, immaterial and affective labor
and capitalism’s “new” hidden abode of production (Hearn 2016,
11).
Digital
reputation is a way of reinforcing the newly made “housewife” whose work is
rendered invisible and being inaugurated as a new kind of
labour in social media. Hearn argues that in the 21st century this
type of value creation is done in ways that are deeply gendered and recall the
appropriation of women’s work “inside and outside of the home by systems of
capitalist expansion in the 16th and 17th centuries” (Hearn 2016, 2). This lies in the logic of precarious and
affective labour where the digitialised forms of human subjectivity are
mingling with new forms of production. The socialisation of labour is a form of
promotion of precarious forms of exploitation hiding the reality of the digital
housewifisation processes accelerated by the lockdown. The mediatised vision of
labour is structurally free of cost as labour and the invisible labour of housewives
form a source of exploitation as a naturally
occurring good (Mies 2007, 269).
The reality though was in contrast
with this image for many affected severely by the lockdown either due to the
loss of income and the pressure for survival, or the overwhelming tasks imposed
on families confined to the home office. Decreased mobility in public spaces
confined many to stay at home with abusive family members, moreover abusive
tendencies were reported to rise as a consequence of the mental health crises
that emerged due to the lockdown. The process of housewifisation and the shift
of precarious and (paid) work on women confined to their homes has brought
several consequences, that are the subject of contemporary studies.
What we know is that this process has been
radical and affected the masses (Fuchs
2020). What we also know is that along with
the burnout, the need for “catching up’” and the “fear of missing out”. parents
with families have to push themselves toward performing more. Colleagues with
no families had the space for working from home in a calm environment boosting
their performance. Parents with children may have felt disproportionately
hindered in their performance finding themselves worried about the future of
their careers.
This type of slavery pushed many
toward putting more self-imposed chains, self-exploitation, on themselves. The
shift of performance to digital platforms has opened the path for self-slavery,
voluntary servitude, as mode to transgress “obstacles of growth”. The
decelerated public life in the public physical space has accelerated forms of
self-deployment. Wage-work and non-wage work have transgressed the boundaries
of personal space deploying the remnants of personal and family time. Wages
have not increased, placing more labour demands on the workers fighting to keep
their jobs. In the wake of the lockdowns optimistic views on newly-gained space
for solidarity in the society along with the perceived threats of alienation
have been expressed (Fuchs 2020). By the last quarter
of 2020 we see that some economic sectors have been affected more severely than
others, deepening class divisions in societies.
The dissolving of physical spaces during the COVID-19 crisis
reinvigorated a basic idea of Marx and Engels; namely, the delimitation between
paid and unpaid labour, public and private spheres. We can observe spill-overs
across spheres more closely as women are exploited in a two-fold manner during
the COVID-19 crisis. We demonstrate that spill-overs have crept up on us
slowly: There is the exploitation of women in the digital economy that is
mediated by social media. And there is voluntary exploitation due to women’s
desire to achieve “the ideal pair” of superwoman in monogamous, paired
marriage. This paper serves as a reminder of the blurring of social spheres and
their gendered demarcations, as we witness the return to the household as the
central unit of society. This shift provides evidence that the essential truths
presented by Engels in the 19th century can be employed to
understand our reality during the COVID crisis.
What applies to the woman in the factory applies to her in all branches of business, right up to medicine and law. The modern individual family is based on the overt or covert domestic slavery of the woman; and modern society is a mass composed solely of individual families as its molecules (Engels 1891a, 181).
Durkheim, Emile. 1893. The
Division of Labour in Society. Trans. W. D. Halls, intro. Lewis A. Coser. New York: Free Press.
Engels, Friedrich. 1891b. To the Early
History of the Family (Bachofen, McLennan, Morgan). Preface to the Fourth
German Edition of The Family, Private Property, and the State. In Marx & Engels Collected Works (MECW)
Volume 27, 203-214. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Fuchs, Christian. 2020. Everyday Life and Everyday Communication in
Coronavirus Capitalism. tripleC:
Communication, Capitalism & Critique 18
(1): 375-399.
Piketty, Thomas. 2013. Capital in
the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Weissbourd, R., Batanova, M., McIntyre, J., & Torres, E. 2020. How the Pandemic is Strengthening Fathers'
Relationships With Their Children. Accessed 9 November, 2020. https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/
Julianna Faludi PhD
Julianna Faludi is a Sociologist
interested in the relationship of Science, Technology and Society and Ethical
Consumption. Her recent research interest unfolds around Social Innovation and
Digital Entrepreneurship for Social Good.
Michelle Crosby
Michelle Crosby is an active Social Scientist with background in Research Methods and Evaluation working in the international affairs industry. She is interested in Teaching, Critical Theory and Analysis, Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research and Research Design.
[2]
https://www.economist.com/international/2020/05/10/pornography-is-booming-during-the-covid-19-lockdowns
[4] https://www.emarketer.com/content/love-time-of-coronavirus-dating-apps-growing-becoming-more-virtual
[5] Impact of Covid-19 on Violence Against Women and Girls and
Service Provision. UN Women Rapid Assessment and Findings. https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/2020/impact-of-covid-19-on-violence-against-women-and-girls-and-service-provision-en.pdf?la=en&vs=0