Inoperativity and Feminist Refusal in Four Strikes

• In Event: 50651 - Anti-Work and Anti-Capitalist Feminist Futures

Abstract

The politics of refusal is inherent in the exercise of labor’s agency. Whether it takes the form of collective disavowal, reframing historical narratives, or as a type of suspension of action, it is a politics that animates preference, choice, incitement, and restraint (Honig 2021; Hartman 2019; Ahmed 2017; Tronti 1980 [1965]). Strikes are generally understood as a concerted refusal to work, a voluntary suspension of work that is more often collectively agreed upon than not. Organizations like trade unions lead the orchestrated effort, and oftentimes the strike happens because of a failure to reach agreement on the terms of work. A legal right to strike institutionalizes the channels of bargaining and negotiation as observable procedures until workers are guaranteed a right of refusal. A strike is commonly seen as the most powerful in the arsenal in labor. But in the absence of organizations, channels of collective bargaining, or even a legal classification of labor as work, how might workers exercise their agency outside of the institutions that are intended to govern them? In this paper, I provide four examples of strikes happening outside the law. The first motivation is a proposal to expand the definitional boundaries of a strike to understand the possibilities and characteristics of worker voice in stringent situations. The second is to comparatively parse the ways that political and social contexts across the four ideal typical cases enable and constrict opportunities of contention. More importantly, the chapter tries to reinstate the agency of the subjugated, and to articulate the varied characteristics of discontented refusal using feminist and DuBoisian theories of inoperativity.

Author

• Youbin Kang, Cornell University