I really like Federici’s work, and was keen to get my hands on this new collection of essays touching in one way or another on the body, particularly the capitalist transformation of the body. I found it to be a bit peculiar – not bad, necessarily, but peculiar. Partly, that’s less about the book than about my reading of it, which was uncharacteristically (for me) fragmented and inconsistent, just because of other things I had going on. This may mean that I’m less able to read it generously than I would like. Partly, I think it’s because the book brings together pieces already published in a range of other contexts, and as sometimes happens with books like that at least some of the pieces felt like part of some sort of larger conversation that I could only guess at. But mostly, I think, it was the fact that Federici’s takes on some of the issues she tackles are kind of idiosyncratic. Which, on the whole, I quite like. Some of the later pieces that touched on reproductive technologies, sexuality as part of regimes of accumulation, imaginings of space exploration and the body under capitalism, and “joyful militancy” were provocative and fascinating – wasn’t necessarily fully convinced by all of their arguments, but I thought they were full of important insights and they prompted me to think differently. Others felt less useful, and…a bit off, somehow, though I’m very conscious that I might just be misreading them. In a number of the pieces, for instances, she speaks quite critically about social construction in general and analyses of gender that make use of the idea of performance in particular. Which, okay, fine. Without putting in more effort than I care to, I can’t pinpoint exactly why I think these feel a bit off, but at least partly it seems to be because the versions of each that she is arguing against do not seem to be the best/strongest/most rigorous/most useful versions. In the case of the Butler-related stuff, there are at least moments where it feels like she’s arguing against the admittedly more common (among supporters as well as opponents) lay understanding of “gender performance” rather than the more usefully materialist and less voluntarist reading that I think (I’m no expert here!) sometimes uses language like “performative effect” instead. Again, I’m no expert – I may be completely misreading what Federici is saying, and it could be that my take is less true to the original sources, which perhaps I have over time adapted in my own head to make some of these ideas more useful to me. And maybe some of what’s going is that in the microenvironments of the left that have produced me, it is longstanding commonsense to read social construction and performativity and so on as complementary to more explicitly social (both marxist and not) ways of understanding the world rather than as opposed, and she seems to be reading them as opposed, at least to an extent, which feels weird and unnecessary to me. And while her politics are not anti-trans, there are bits of her historical materialist understanding of gender, production, and reproduction that (again, to my inexpert eyes) feel like they might unintentionally carry some implications that are a bit troubling in that regard. Anyway, as always with Federici, there’s lots of really thought provoking stuff in here, it just felt kind of uneven.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.