This week’s faculty seminar will feature a presentation by Surbhi Vatsa, Visiting Faculty at NLSIU, on ‘Revisiting the Invisible Labour Theory of Housework: A Response from the Contemporary Archive.’

Abstract

This essay locates itself in the lineage of the Wages for Housework Movement of the second half of the twentieth century, both academically and politically. Revisiting the thesis that capitalism keeps women’s labour underpaid or unpaid by ‘invisibilizing’ it, the essay argues for a new strategy of ‘hypervisibilisation’ and adds to the argument made by the likes of Silvia Federici, Dalla Costa, Selma James and Nancy Fraser. This argument emerges from a study of the advertisements and their usage of women’s images- especially as ‘mother’ and ‘housewife ’- in the 1960s and 70s North Indian, Hindi public sphere. Reading these advertisements alongside Marx’s theory of the fetishism of commodities, the paper argues that the capitalist market turns women’s care labour into a ‘meta commodity’ that can not be compensated for in terms of human wages, and hence uses hypervisbilisation as a tool of keeping women’s care outside of the realm of monied wage labour.

About the Speaker

Surbhi is a visiting faculty at NLS Bangalore and has recently been awarded their doctorate from the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU. Surbhi’s research area straddles questions of popular culture and gender in contemporary India. Before joining NLS, Surbhi has taught at Miranda House and Krea University.