Aff - Informal Economics - Michigan 7 2023 KLAB

Acknowledgements
I want to thank the amazing debaters that worked arduously on this file: Group Leader: Trishay, Group members: Lola, Emely, Amanti, Joey and TJ.
Lab Leader Marquis Ard
Beautiful Experiments 1AC (Long Version)
The Western Cultural Imaginary operationalizes itself through preconceived notions of informal sector work which overshadow the meaningful economies of affect that women/deviant bodies exist in. The optimism invested in the political is dangerous for those that navigate life in fundamentally contingent ways.
Elena Zambelli 19, 9/1/19, Elena Zambelli is an ethnographer with interdisciplinary expertise on gender and sexuality, race, migration and intersecting inequalities and a senior research associate with the University of Lancaster, “Intimate others and risky tenants: disentangling the economy of affect shaping women’s migratory projects in Italy”, Journal of Political Power, 12:3, 425-442, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/2158379X.2019.1669265?needAccess=true&role=button, Acc 7/9/23 [tvisha]
The Western cultural imaginary that the market and intimacy are and ought to remain bounded spheres of human activity–the ‘separate spheres and hostile worlds’ view (Zelizer2005, p. 22)–affects the value of the activities that more visibly transgress it :sex and care work. Their construction as acts and attachments that should not be for sale generates and reproduces an ‘economy of affect’(Richard and Rudnyckyj.2009) which makes certain bodies more likely to perform these activities. In contemporary Western European countries it is indeed largely migrant women who occupy the positions of the carer (see for example Barone and Mocetti2011, Triandafyllidou and Marchetti2013)and the sex worker i.e. the market equivalents of the binary roles of the wife-and-mother or of the prostitute that the heteronormative order reserves to women (Grosz1990, p. 129). The transgression of the (fictitious) boundaries safeguarding the sphere of intimacy from the commodification of its constitutive acts and attachments (hereinafter the market/inti-macy binary) appears to be the condition of possibility of their migratory projects. However, in contexts increasingly characterised by restrictive mobility regimes(Vuolajärvi 2018) and repressive prostitution policies within and across national borders the intersection of work, intimacy and migration gives rise to different hierarchies of visibility and policy concern for the precarious, exploitative and hazardous conditions under which women perform their labour. Following Constable’s invitation to cast ‘the pairing of commodification and intimacy’ as the main topic of analysis (Constable2009, p. 58), and drawing from my ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, in this article I discuss the relationship between work and intimacy in thelives of migrant women for whom the commodification of intimate acts and attachments byand large encapsulates their opportunities to sustain themselves and their transnational intimacies. To this purpose I use Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’, which she defines as‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility’ whereby a subject projects its continuity into an enabling object that is also disabling’(Berlant2006,p.21).For Berlant,‘the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world [. . .] are conditionsof the attrition or the wearing out of the subject’(ibid., 23). Hence, in this article I argue that the intricate entanglement–rather than the separation–of sex, care, love and work inmigrant women’s lives constitutes what makes their under-valued, exploitative and risky jobs meaningful and valuable to them, as they pursue their cruelly optimistic attachments toa better life for themselves and their family members. The dire conditions under whichwomen perform sex and care work attest to the workings of intersecting structures of inequality, as inflected (mainly) by gender, class, race and sexuality, and primarily the gendered and racialised (Brah1993) economy of affect engendered by the market/intimacybinary, restrictive mobility regimes and discriminatory prostitution laws. In showing migrant women’s predicaments I aim to contribute to contemporary feminist scholars’ and sex workers rights activists’ debates in academia and policy making spaces on the nature and regulation of prostitution, arguing for rescaling its relationship to harm from an ontological to a phenomenological level. This article is based on my larger ethnographic research project on the relationship between sex, pleasure and the market in processes of women’s subjectification incontemporary Western countries. In 2012–13 I conducted 14 months of fieldwork in Italy, moving across a continuum of spaces of leisure and work wherein Italian andmigrant women consumed and/or commodified their sexual desirability–pole dance schools, discos, strip clubs, and streets where the sale of sex is negotiated. I conducted41 open-ended interviews with women working as pole dance entrepreneurs and/or teachers, burlesquers ,ragazze immagine(image girls),3acrobatic strippers, lap dancers and indoor sex workers, and two with former street sex workers who are now activists working in harm-reduction programmes. Simultaneously, I collaborated for a year with two non-governmental organisations providing sexual and reproductive health infor-mation to street sex workers, and I regularly volunteered in the night-time outreach activities (hereinafter: mobile unit) organised by one of them.4This article brings together the experiences of migrant women occupying different positions in the sphere of commodified intimacy in Italy. The interview with Kate–a young Ukrainian woman working as image girl while in higher education–discloses the predicament of her mother, who travelled to Italy as an undocumented migrant and achieved family reunification with her daughter only after several years of informal employment as a careworker. The field notes from my activities with the mobile unit relay fragments of the conversations between ‘us’ in the van–frequently women, Italian, and in a self-ascribed ‘helping’ role–and the female sex workers whom we reached out to. Power flows across and structures all social situations (Foucault1977), and inevitably shapes the circulation of words, emotions, expectations and silences in the interaction between the researcher and the subjects of her research. I am therefore aware that my position as a white female researcher with Italian (i.e. EU) citizenship influenced my fieldwork, and that the power imbalances were particularly intense in the interaction with the women I encountered while on the mobile unit. This awareness is reflected in my analytic approach to these exchanges as narratives: their value, therefore, does not pertain to the realm of un/truth but to the performative. What they foreground is women’s negotiation of their predicaments in the context of the profound disparities shaping the space between us.The article is structured as follows. First, I trace the workings of intersecting gendered, class-based and racialised hierarchies of power in the economy of affectengendered by the market/intimacy binary. Next I highlight the place and meaning of this trope in feminist and sex workers rights activists’ debates on prostitution. Subsequently, I show how female migrants in Italy navigate care and sex work in contexts characterised by restrictive mobility regimes and discriminatory prostitution laws.
Our approach to informal economic relations isn’t reducible to a singular space but as a paradigmatic examination of the role of exploitation within the political economy writ large. Only an encounter erotic/affective economy can address the true nature of exploitation and alienation.
(Annie McClanahan and Jon-David Settell ’21McClanahan is Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she teaches contemporary American literature and culture, Marxist theory, and interdisciplinary approaches to economic crisis. Mahindra Humanities Center Postdoctoral Fellow in 2010-11, and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in 2012-13. Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Center for 21st Century Studies in 2013-14. Humanities Center, Harvard University, Postdoctoral Fellow, 2010-2011 B.A. in English and World Literature, Pitzer College, M.S.W. in Clinical Social Work, Columbia University, M.A. in Comparative Literature, San Francisco State University EG)
In fact, however, distinctions in the method of wage payment—the different forms that wages take, the different means by which they are paid, and the different measures of output they represent—have been central to the history of service work. Attention to the systemic feminization and racialization of various wage systems not only lets us connect sex work with other forms of service work but also links service work to longer and more global histories of hyper-exploitation within informal labor markets. Attention to the history of waitressing in the United States, for instance, reveals an intimate connection between tipping and the feminization of certain professions. Early twentieth-century union activists and Progressive Era feminists who believed tipping would encourage female immorality even sound rather like Fleming; thus, one reformer argued “the tip establishes between [the male customer] and the girl [waitress] a relation of patronage which may easily be made the beginning of improper attentions,” while the Industrial Workers of the World claimed that tipping would make female service workers “servile, slavish . . . and [likely] to succumb to ‘the easier way’ of loose morals” (qtd. in Cobble 1991: 42). Such accounts suggest that tip work was feminized because tips elicited excessive feminine “servility” and “slavishness.” In fact, however, tip wages were the result of a hyperexploitative labor arrangement already yoked both to racialization (one of the first US companies to force employees to rely almost entirely on tips was the Pullman Company, which hired only Black men from the South because “the southern negro is . . . more adapted to serve with a smile”) and to gender (Seagrave 1998: 17–18; see also Cobble 1991; Oat- man 2016). Meanwhile, the connection between waitressing and sex work ran the other way, too, as sex workers caught by police with cash in their pockets and in danger of arrest often claimed it was tips from their waitressing job (see Cobble 1991: 24–25). All these workers—the Pullman porters, the waitresses, and the sex workers who claimed to be waitresses—have been left out of traditional working-class organization not because cash is sleazy, and not because those who rely on tips have “loose morals” or are somehow more abject than those who punch a time clock for their wage, but rather because these forms of work and these methods of wage payment have been so effectively racialized and feminized
Highlighting informal workers is an epistemic strategy parallel but fundamentally opposed to ‘real politik” of political economy. The affirmative is a radical deconstruction of inherently gender and sexual labor relations both public and private.
Samson 15 Samson, Melanie. School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. “Accumulation by Dispossession and the Informal Economy – Struggles over Knowledge, Being and Waste at a Soweto Garbage Dump.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 33, no. 5, Aug. 2015, pp. 813–30, https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815600058. Accessed 9 July 2023. “Primitive” in the context of the evidence is described as such in reference Karl’s Marx’s description of the informal economy. We do not condone bigoted language. //dre
A growing body of scholarship highlights that accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003) creates surplus populations who must sustain themselves outside wage labor (cf. Li, 2010; Perreault, 2013; Sanyal, 2014 [2007]; Sassen, 2010). Noting that many of the dispossessed turn to the informal economy, this literature establishes the need to interrogate how informal aspects of the economy are bound up in processes of accumulation by dispossession. However, there is a tendency to focus exclusively on how accumulation by dispossession leads people to become informal workers. Disrupting the unidirectional nature of this narrative, this article explores how informal workers create new spheres of accumulation that the state and formal capital seek to capture. The article is based on analysis of the attempt by the Johannesburg Council and its Pikitup waste management company to grant a tender to a private company to recycle materials at the Marie Louise landfill in Soweto, South Africa. It draws on 42 group interviews with informal reclaimers who salvaged materials at the dump and 63 individual interviews with reclaimers, Pikitup management, and Council representatives conducted between March 2009 and August 2010 as part of a longer social history of the dump. I argue that the Council and Pikitup’s desire to enclose the dump must not be taken as the simple effort to dispossess reclaimers of a pre-existing resource. Historically, garbage dumps have been the final burial grounds for unwanted commodities and sites for the permanent destruction of value. Drawing on Searle’s (2006) theorization of social ontology, I explore what is required to transform a dump from a commodity cemetery to a resource mine. I argue that at Marie Louise (as at many dumps across the developing world), it was informal reclaimers who re-cast the waste as valuable and the dump as a site for the production of value through a combination of intellectual labor, physical labor, and struggle. In attempting to enclose the dump, the municipality sought to capture the physical materials interred within it as well as the very framing and establishment of these materials as valuable, while simultaneously erasing the role of reclaimers in these processes. The reclaimers’ understanding that they produced both the knowledge and the new sphere of accumulation that the Council and Pikitup were trying to appropriate played a pivotal role in spurring them to contest and ultimately prevent the enclosure of the dump. ‘‘Epistemic injustice’’ that disregarded the reclaimers in their capacity as knowers (Fricker, 2007) and epistemic dispossession were therefore central to both the attempted process of accumulation by dispossession and how it was successfully challenged. Highlighting the epistemic and social agency of informal workers frequently considered the epitome of ‘‘human waste’’ (Bauman, 2004) establishes the importance of recognizing all informal workers as producers of knowledge who transform social reality and interrogating the implications for how we theorize accumulation by dispossession. The article proceeds in six sections. The first reviews literature on accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy. The second draws on Searle’s (2006) theorization of social ontology to understand how sanitary landfills are established and transformed as social facts. The third section explores how reclaimers converted Marie Louise from a commodity cemetery into a resource mine, while the fourth analyzes how neoliberalization created a motivation for the municipality to enclose the dump in order to benefit from this transformation in its social ontology. The fifth section argues that ‘‘epistemic injustice’’ (Fricker, 2007) and epistemic dispossession are central to accumulation by dispossession and struggles against it. The final section draws out implications for theorizations of accumulation by dispossession. Accumulation by dispossession and the informal economy In Capital, Marx (1990) focuses primarily on the dynamics of expanded reproduction within capitalism. However, since Perelman (2000) highlighted the continuing nature of primitive accumulation throughout capitalism’s history, a growing body of literature theorizes the role, form, and nature of primitive accumulation within contemporary capitalism (cf. de Angelis, 2001, 2004; Hart, 2006; Harvey, 2003). The understanding of primitive accumulation as an ongoing process is most closely associated with David Harvey’s arguments in The New Imperialism (Harvey, 2003). Harvey argues that in order to assist capital in addressing a crisis of overaccumulation, neoliberal governments are creating new spheres of accumulation by privatizing public goods and services and facilitating the enclosure of common resources. As this form of accumulation is not limited to the birth of capitalism, Harvey argues against calling it ‘‘primitive’’ and proposes the alternative concept of ‘‘accumulation by dispossession.’’ Webber notes that Harvey’s theorization of accumulation by dispossession differs from Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation in important ways. Most crucially, while for Marx primitive accumulation changes class relations by separating producers from their means of production and forcing them into wage labor, Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession includes the erosion of common property rights to means of consumption (Webber, 2008: 401). As it is not focused exclusively on changes to access to the means of production, the concept ‘‘accumulation by dispossession’’ opens the possibility that dispossession is not necessarily bound up in a shift to wage labor. Li observes that even at the time of the initial enclosure movement, dispossessed peasants did not move seamlessly into waged employment (Li, 2010: 70–71). She and a range of scholars argue that a key feature of accumulation by dispossession in the current era is precisely the fact that dispossession is delinked from proletarianization, as capital values the resources to be enclosed, but not the people who must be dispossessed of them. Rather than being a central mechanism for bringing people into capitalist labor relations, accumulation by dispossession plays the opposite role of rendering increasing numbers of people permanently surplus to the needs of capital (Li, 2010; Perreault, 2013; Sanyal, 2014 [2007]; Sanyal and Bhattacharyya, 2009; Sassen, 2010; Soederberg, 2012). As many of these people turn to the informal economy to generate their livelihoods, this understanding facilitates fresh ways of theorizing the relationship between enclosure, dispossession, the informal economy, and capitalism. Scholars working with a classical Marxist understanding in which the transition to wage labor is central to primitive accumulation see the rise of the informal economy as pathological and as evidence of a stalled transition to ‘‘real’’ capitalism (Moore, 2004: 91–92). By contrast, Sanyal sees informal workers (other than those subcontracted by capital) as part of the ‘‘need economy’’ constituted by people excluded from capitalist relations. Rather than serving as evidence of an incomplete capitalist transition, they are an integral part of the ‘‘capital – not-capital’’ complex that, as Sanyal argues, characterizes postcolonial economies. According to Sanyal, because India is a democracy, government cannot simply abandon the excluded and must engage in ‘‘developmental governmentality’’ to reverse the effects of primitive accumulation by supporting people in the ‘‘need economy’’ to reproduce themselves outside the circuits of capital. For Sanyal, government support for the informal economy is not about promoting budding capitalists, but is, instead, about containing the political effects of dispossession by ensuring that people excluded from wage labor are able to sustain themselves (Sanyal, 2014 [2007]). Gidwani and Wainright (2014: 44–45) correctly note that Sanyal overstates the separation of the need economy and the accumulation economy and fails to recognize that, far from being permanently quarantined within the informal economy, people move betwee

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