Beyond the Myth of Woman: The Becoming-Transfeminist of (Post-)Marxism

Abstract

Antonella Corsani is an Italian economist who teaches at the Universite de Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes and one of the editors of the collective volumes Vers un capitalisme cognitif [Toward a Cognitive Capitalism] (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001) and L’eta del capitalismo cognitivo [The Era of Cognitive Capitalism] (Verona: Ombre corte, 2002). As this essay demonstrates, her work focuses on the changing nature of labor in post-Fordist capitalism, particularly the phenomena of irregular or intermittent work, intellectual or immaterial labor, and the “feminization” of labor. Like many post-workerist thinkers, she takes a broadly global perspective on contemporary issues, combining French post-structuralist philosophy and feminism, Italian political economy, American ethnic and queer activism and post-colonial analysis, to construct a sophisticated theoretical paradigm for interpreting and intervening into current debates over subversive subjectivity and the organization of resistance to global capital. This essay, which reprises many of the themes and methods that emerge in Corsani’s essays for Multitudes, was written especially for this issue of SubStance. Timothy S. Murphy, translator