Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

of patriarchal revenge, violence is enacted upon the bodies of trans women with frequency and force experienced by no other group of women apart from those who work in the sex trade.
     
    Transsexual women and women who sell sex own bodies which are explicitly – rather than implicitly – part of the brutal capitalist exchange of gender signs. It is seen as somehow apt that these women should apologise for themselves. It is seen as somehow understandable that violence should be done to them on a scale unimaginable even for cis women. Across the world, prostitutes and transsexual women are murdered at horrifying rates. In a recent report for the police district of Columbia, it was estimated that 10-20% of all violent hate crime was targeted at trans women, despite the relatively small size of the trans community in the area. 15 Trans women are murdered so frequently that since 1998, a dedicated day of remembrance has been held every year on November the 20th to draw international attention to the problem of violence against trans people.
     
    Writer and trans activist Julia Serano memorably called attention to trans women as the “whipping girls” of Western culture. 16 The bodies of transsexual women are marginalised and punished precisely because they expose the mechanisms by which the modern carapace of gender capital is maintained, threatening its hold over women’s bodies.
     

4
Dirty Work
     
    The most elementary demand is not the right to work or receive equal pay for work, but the right to equal work itself
Juliet Mitchell
    Marginalised bodies do marginalised work. Bodies that are arrogated and controlled can be persuaded to do work that is underpaid and overlooked. Slavemaking is a social science, and nowhere is that science more expertly demonstrated than in the continued ability of contemporary industrial culture to persuade women perform the vast majority of vital domestic and caring labour without expecting reward or payment.
     
    After a century of feminism, women still do the lion’s share of caring, cooking and cleaning duties, for free. Nowadays, we are also encouraged to do ‘real’ work – i.e., work traditionally done by men, outside the home – on top of these domestic duties, albeit for less pay and fewer rewards. In 2003, British women still performed an average of nineteen hours’ worth of housework per week, compared with only five hours for men, whose share of the domestic burden has remained essentially unchanged since the early 1980s. 17 Whilst unemployment and retirement decreased the number of hours spent by men on domestic work, they increased women’s hours.
     
    Women’s work-relationship to their bodies mirrors our work-relationship to our homes: we labour at great personal cost to gild our cages, our increasing resentment tempered by fear of the social consequences of refusal. This fear is engendered in us by patriarchal capitalism, which would have everything to lose were women to once refuse to perform for free all the boringdomestic work vital to support alienated industrial labour. We tidy away the messy reality of our bodies just as we tidy away the grim reality of domestic toil, because have been schooled to fear losing our womanhood, losing our identity, if we refuse to shape up and clean house, no matter what our other engagements of paid work and social interaction may be. Modern women are told that we can have it all, which in practice means that we must and should do it all – with a smile, and for free.
     
    There was once a dedicated movement, tied in to Marxist feminism, to change the labour conditions of working women across the world. This movement petered out in the 1980s, despite the fact that the labour dispute on the domestic front was never close to being won. Instead, men and women have retreated into a grim stalemate, and many find themselves standing on a picket line that extends across every home, from the sink to the washing machine to the kids’ bedrooms. Before we set up homes together, we may not be aware that this picket line exists, but the strategic socio-sexual marginalisation of women’s bodies makes it seem somehow natural and right that all the dirty, messy work of the home should be performed by women for low pay or no pay. Women are seen as animalistic, manipulable, and born to be low-paid workers; because we see ourselves in that way too, we capitulate – we abandon our resistance in effect, we scab.
     
Domestic drudgery is a