Life-times of Superfluous Expenditure

• In Event: Southern Questions: Sexuality and Racial Capitalism

Abstract

Marxist feminist scholarship proposes hidden reproductive labor, in which sexual labor emerges, as value-producing labor-time. Scholars on racial capitalism summon the role of disposable racialized life in the dispossessive accumulation of capital. I examine superfluous expenditure in the realm of sexual practice in a moment when reproductive labor has been capitalized, and waste, including disposable life, has become the site of intensive and financialized capitalist investment. I explore marginalized Philippine contexts of domestic and sex service economy and slum life to engage their implications for transnational justice, and ask, what might life-times of surplus expenditure look and feel like?

Presenter

• Neferti Tadiar, Barnard College