Technologies of the Family

Domestic work is easier said than done.  Cleaning, cooking, child care; it all may sound easy, but a lot of back breaking hard work and ‘elbow grease’ is put into these tasks.  Especially for the women who do this as a full-time job.  Most domestic workers are illegal immigrants who come to America in search of a better life and do what they can to better their lifestyle here and send money back home to relatives.  Since many of them are in the states illegally, if anything goes wrong with the job or they have an issue with their employers, usually none of these workers speak out against in fear of being sent back home.

But now they have means of being protected, The Domestic Worker’s Bill iof Rights.  The bill offers temporary disability benefits to full-time workers, redress for sexual harrassment in the workplace, time and a half for any overtime work, and consists of eight hour shift per day, with a total of forty hours per week and forty-four hours for live in workers.  Along with domestic workers, the bill also protects housekeepers, nannies, and caretakers of the elderly.

Many employers and employees of domestic work are unaware of the legislation and what it entails.  To spread awareness Ms.Francois, who works for the advocacy of the group Domestic Workers United, went all around the city of New York introducing herself, educating, and handing out pamphlets to domestic workers and nannies about the bill that was passed to ensure their safety and rights as workers.

In this article, “Having Discourse: Talk Matters in Sex and Power, Says Foucault”, the author Anastacia Mott Austin questions some of Foucault’ s beliefs. The author writes about “We Other Victorians” from volume one of Michel Foucault’s, “The History of Sexuality.

From reading Foucault, you can see that he definitley shifts away from the mainstream because he brings up things about sexuality that people don’t usually analyze. Austin talks about how Foucault’ s view is that if repression is an “”injunction to silence”” then by speaking of sex we are deliberately going against authority. Austin then states that Foucault’s point is that is what is significant is not that we as people are repressed, but what we say about it and how we say it determines our power. In “Periodization” (on pg. # 128) Foucault talks about repression and sex. He says, “…. we have too long reduced it to silence.” He is not conservative in his view points of the subject.

Austin also talks about the time of repression (post 16th century) when capitalism was coming into the world. She says, “It makes sense why sex should have to be pushed under the covers, so to speak, so that the most could be gotten out of workers, that they be productive (and reproductive) rather than gluttonous pleasure-seekers.” (pg. # 2- of this article).

I think what she is saying can be related to what we learned in class. This kind of repression may be creating a certain kind of person or product so capitalism is successful. Maybe this was a type of control of society that existed back then where sexuality needs to be secured to have more labor power. This point seems to express a time and era when repression an important subject. This influenced the world of capitalism to some degree. It is also interesting to think about Foucault’s view on power and repression.