The central committee of H.E.N.S. in conjunction of the NWC would like to invite you to answer any or all of the questions below. We may edit submissions for brevity and content and post them with your approval. They are all extremely broad and unwieldy questions. We are interested in posting answers side by side from people with differing lines of work.
1. The unregulated labor market in NYC is highly segregated along race and gender lines. This segregation seems indicative of the overlap, co-dependency and at times inextricable nature of race, class and gender inequality and oppression. What are the particular recourses you utilize in thinking through the inter-relations between these forms of inequality? Do you find occasions where focus on only one factor in the working of domination is necessary or expedient and others in which it is only in thinking about their intersection that you can proceed?
2. The creation and deployment of abstractions of “the worker” has been essential to leftist movements historically and seems, for better and for worse, particularly absent from current American politics and culture. The limitations of some of these historical myths are abundantly clear, especially as they served to erase gender and race difference. Are there elements of or particular characters from the pantheon of leftist labor myth-making you would like to see resurrected, redeployed, or reconfigured in a contemporary context?
3. Do you get your nails done? (ie) How do you negotiate, embrace, ignore, or resist the signifiers of gender, class, or race attending any particular act of daily dress, grooming or self-presentation. For the sake of brevity we ask that you choose something very specific: arm-pit waxing, mustache grooming, sideburn cultivation, etc. though if you would like to answer or dismiss the question more generally that is great as well.