Woman’s Work: Making Something Out of Nothing

This paper introduces this Special Issue of the Journal of World-Systems Research, “Women in World-Literature: A Woman’s Work” by making the case that the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC 2015: 9) conception of “combined and uneven development” can not only be applied to women’s writing in conversation with materialist feminist theory, but perhaps misses the ways in which women, Black feminists, indigenous lifeways, and queer world-making shows us a form of work that is not bound by the wage or value-exchange system, as many acts of care or favors often described as “women’s work”—cannot be repaid (Walton and Luker 2019). Missing from the WReC’s framework is an explicit engagement with women’s writing and how women contribute to, and are exploited by, the world-system. This Special Issue thus focuses on only one aspect of women’s engagement with the world-literary system: women’s work. From the labor market, motherhood, sex work, affective work, to knowledge production and storytelling, to the very work of consumption itself. Social reproduction theory and materialist feminists have made the case that capitalism relies on the invisible labor of women, particularly domestic work and community work. Yet, if we consider the creative dimensions of women’s work, do we discover gaps in world-systems frameworks which, when refracted through literary analysis, actually upset capitalism’s insistence upon the inevitability of exchange value? To exemplify this, I turn to Silvia Federici’s explanations of the witch as a tool to think about how we might “make something out of nothing.”