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Import/Export: Housework in an International Frame

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Anca Parvulescu
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Abstract

A close reading of Ulrich Seidl's Import Export (2007), a film on labor migration between eastern and western Europe, provides an international frame for revisiting the second-wave feminist debate on housework. In the last two decades, “women's work” has been outsourced transnationally on a large scale, leading to the emergence of an international private sphere inhabited by a new housewife figure. The feminist housework debate of the 1970s supplies the groundwork for a critique of autonomist neo-Marxism that foregrounds the role of language, translation, and visual gesture in the contemporary import/export of labor.

Type
Special Topic: Work Coordinated by Vicky Unruh
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 4: Special Topic Work , October 2012 , pp. 845 - 862
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

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