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Abolition Archives, Feminist Futures
Kathi Weeks
Duke University Press, 2026
Abolitionist Archives, Feminist Futures takes up the work of three iconic feminist thinkers—Angela Davis, Shulamith Firestone, and Donna Haraway—to ask how each author’s vision of work, the family, and the carceral state can expand contemporary feminism’s ability to structurally analyze social problems. Kathi Weeks examines the archive of this unexpected collection of Marxist feminists whose works are united by their abolitionist approaches, arguing that feminism can gain a broader constituency by taking up anti-capitalist critique and praxis. Across the book’s chapters, Weeks recontextualizes well-known feminist texts in a new and original light, bringing their insight from the past into the present and future of abolitionist politics.
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front cover of The Problem with Work
The Problem with Work
Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
Kathi Weeks
Duke University Press, 2011
In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation. Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.
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