In The Problem with Work , Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good.
She is the author of Constituting Feminist Subjects and a co-editor of The Jameson Reader ..
About the Author: Kathi Weeks is Associate Professor of Women\'s Studies at Duke University.
Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.
Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a Postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation.
We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects.
Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied.
Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have "depoliticized" it, or removed it from the realm of political critique.
While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity.
In The Problem with Work , Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good
