The Laboring Body: 2013 UCI Comparative Literature Graduate Conference

Philip Anselmo
Comparative Literature
UC Irvine

Jennifer Gutierrez
Comparative Literature
UC Irvine

The last several years of global economic meltdown have reinvigorated public debate around the mechanisms of capitalism, particularly as people recognize their role in sustaining the system that exploits them. Organized labor, as well as those outside of the workforce (whether unemployed, homeless, or laboring in shadow economies), have played an important role in the Occupy movement and in uprisings in the Arab world, Europe, and elsewhere. Meanwhile, budget cuts and other austerity measures, as well as the general climate of crisis within the humanities and within public education as a whole, has produced a critical moment for student movements and academic workers throughout the world. While heterogeneous in their practices and conditions, these movements nonetheless share in common that they each have begun to organize the laboring body as a political force at the same time as it organizes itself. Recent theoretical work by thinkers such as David Harvey, Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri, to name just a few, has re- examined the role of labor, particularly as understood in the context of biopolitics.

This conference addressed the ways in which politics is manifest at the level of labor embodied. In other words, how are bodies organized and self-organized within the system of labor at this most recent (neoliberal) stage of capitalism and the crises it currently faces? In what ways is the notion of labor being transformed when the body is no longer put to the service of capital but instead actively works against it? How do living relationships between knowledge and labor disrupt systems which create liberal conceptualizations of responsibility modeled on notions of labor, indebtedness, and contractual obligation? How is labor aestheticized, and in what ways do myths or allegories of labor construct theories or reinforce ideologies of how bodies work (or are worked)? With these questions in mind, the conference invited papers from people engaged with questions of labor embodied, whether through politics, philosophy, critical theory, art, literature, film, science studies, culture or pedagogy, with a special emphasis on interdisciplinary work.