Introduction: women writing work

“I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.”¹ So wrote Oscar Wilde, in his characteristically glib and stylish manner. The idea of a world without work might well jar with our contemporary minds, as indeed it might have with the working classes of Wilde’s own times. Recent world events have put conventional forms of work under strain as well as highlighting forms of work we might previously have taken for granted. We might detect a distorted echo of Wilde in the title story of Nicole Flattery’s Show Them a Good Time (2019), which depicts an unpaid job placement scheme at a garage in rural Ireland. It opens with the lines: “The schemes were for people with plenty of time, or people not totally unfamiliar with being treated like shit. I was intimate with both situations.”² In this special issue, we seek to consider a variety of representations of work across recent Irish writing, spanning Wilde’s world without work and Flattery’s sense of worthless work while also highlighting Irish writing which moves away from traditional understandings of work, challenging and troubling them.

This is a special issue which seeks to re-politicise work in its various and heterogenous forms, especially as it is rendered across literature. Specifically, we are interested in Irish women writers’ literary engagement with work. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how the so-called “second shift” is still a reality of women’s lives, despite professions to gender equality. To take just two examples, the majority of homeschooling over lockdown was performed by mothers rather than fathers, and, in our own field, female academics’ submissions to peer-reviewed journals fell sharply over lockdown as those of their male counterparts rose.³ For all the changes the pandemic may have wrought on the ways in which we work, work remains, like all other areas of patriarchal society, fundamentally gendered. In Kathi Weeks’ words: “To say that work is organised by gender is to observe that it is a site where, at a minimum, we can find gender enforced, performed and recreated.”⁴ We contend that this foundational gendering of work has significant implications for all forms of labour carried out by women – from waged work to domestic and emotional labour to creative practice – and that more general trends in how we view work in various phases of social development are refracted through this gendered lens.

As editors and contributors, we take work to be a multivalent, intricately connected entity that cannot be considered within one domain or discipline alone. Its many meanings, broadly (although not exclusively) differentiated in this issue between economic, domestic, and creative work, are at play across the articles collected here. Although, in what follows, we parse economic, domestic, and creative work under distinct headings, the articles in this special issue show the interweavings of these categories in women’s working lives and writing and how, in many ways, the boundaries of these categories are necessarily porous. From the work of reading and the creative practice of artists to housework and the desire to opt-out of work altogether, the contributions to this issue cover a range of definitions, methodological approaches, genres, and forms. In this introduction, we outline some of the theoretical underpinnings of contemporary Ireland’s worlds of work, as well as the historical and immanent divisions of labour in which they are rooted; in this, we pay particular heed to those types of labour predominantly performed by women and seek to elucidate the reasons why.

Economic work

The COVID-19 pandemic changed modes of work irrevocably. From the rolling out of what, in effect, constituted the previously-unthinkable Universal Basic Income through furlough schemes and pandemic unemployment payments, to the trend towards working from home and/or remote working, to the rise of “surveillance software” to monitor workers’ productivity, to categorisations as to the “essentialness” of different jobs, debates as to the viability of the conventional 9–5 are ongoing.⁵ As societies and cities closed down, the (relatively privileged) demographic who could work from home endured a work week uninterrupted by the often materialist distractions “earned” by a hard day’s work – such as a drink with friends or a trip to the cinema. For others, such as those on furlough the pandemic provided an unusual break in which to consider how work might be seen as:

a social machine that eats up their time, their energies, and their ability to sustain social connections and to reproduce a common life that they can recognise as good – or even human.⁶

Indeed, we might even draw a link between these two conditions and the emergence, in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, of the phenomenon which commentators have termed “The Great Resignation.”

Describing the trend whereby the millennial and Gen Z demographics are leaving their jobs in unprecedented numbers, “The Great Resignation” and other iterations such as “Quiet Quitting” encapsulate the post-pandemic malaise associated with work.⁷ Referring to the performance of tasks outlined in a job description, and no more, “Quiet Quitting” in many ways points directly at the problem with work in pre-pandemic, late capitalist societies. Namely, millennial and Gen Z workers have inherited a work system with little to no work/life balance, stagnated wages, increased cost of living, and decreased job and pension security, all the while being impressed with the constant need to prove themselves by going above and beyond and sacrificing yet more of themselves and their lives to work. Gen Z and millennial respondents to surveys on work cite the pressure to work ever-longer hours for the same (or, in real terms, decreasing) pay, to constantly look busy and to be available and reachable at all times of the day and night, with 58% of Gen Z workers experiencing work-related burn out in 2022.⁸ In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes speculated that, with technological advances driving increased productivity, his grandchildren’s generation would enjoy 15-hour work weeks.⁹ Instead, our work systems have incorporated expectations of ever-greater profit margins and productivity such that simply performing the terms of one’s employment – and not going “over and above” to distinguish oneself against the competition – is mistermed, and implicitly saddled with the moral judgement of “quitting.”

Nevertheless, the increasingly widespread dissatisfaction with the all-encompassing nature of work under late capitalism indicated by these trends means that we are at an interesting point in the history of “work.” In her 2021 study, Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism, Amelia Horgan suggests that “[s]tandard employment […] is something of a historical anomaly,” and sets about defining “work” in the context of late capitalism as a historically specific moment.¹⁰ For Horgan, the structuring principle of this contemporary era of work is what she calls an “aspiration deficit model,” an idea broadly aligning with Lauren Berlant’s articulation of cruel optimism.¹¹ In their book of the same title, Berlant suggests that the “good life fantasy” promised by Fordist, bootstrap capitalism continues to animate, shape and dictate the affective norms and aspirations we attach to participation in the capitalist system, even as the historic particularities of late capitalism make these aspirations impossible to attain. Similarly, Horgan suggests that late capitalist attitudes to work are characterised by a paradox wherein work is so totalising as to become the means and barometer of personal fulfilment, but it increasingly fails to deliver the culturally received and personally nurtured aspirations attached to it.¹² As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello so compellingly outline in The New Spirit of Capitalism, capitalism is a constantly transforming and evolving ideology with a series of related practices; its longstanding ability to overcome its internal crises is rooted in belief systems external to it – beliefs and structures held as true and important by the majority of the population. Changes in capitalist organisation, then, are wrought when the workers upholding capitalist accumulation deem a certain iteration of capitalism to be out of line with their needs or beliefs about the world. At this point, Boltanski and Chiapello argue, capitalism “maintain[s] its powers of attraction” by drawing “upon resources external to it, beliefs which, at a given moment in time, possess considerable powers of persuasion” even as they are external to capitalism’s aims and “have been generated to quite different ends than justifying capitalism.”¹³

What this means for our current and future world(s) of work is as yet unclear. “The Great Resignation” and “Quiet Quitting” might signify a rupture in the viability of current modes of work and, more importantly, the affective and ideological norms supporting such modes. It might also indicate nothing more than the occasion of another permutation of capitalism, its underlying viability as a structure unchallenged. In our consideration of historical, existing, emerging, and utopian forms of work in this special issue, we might bear these (im)possibilities for new modes of (non)capitalist work in mind.

Trends like those outlined above have in many ways been pre-empted by literature. In North America, for instance, Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, centres on a character who chooses prescription-drug induced sleep over participation in the workforce, living off benefits and her inheritance. Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019) satirises the world of temp work, sketching a convincing portrait of exactly why so many highly-educated millennials might be dissatisfied with, what David Graeber calls, “bullshit jobs” in which they find themselves. Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020) explores the messy relationship between sex, race and work, in a novel that mocks and critiques the publishing and cultural industries that enact and reproduce (and often republish) versions of white supremacy. In Britain, writers such as Rachel Cusk have demonstrated interest in non-normative forms of work against the backdrop of 1990s prosperity, as in The Country Life (1997). Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2016) uses accumulative detail to undermine the idea of accumulative labour, which is essential in “put[ting] meaning back” into the world and maintaining the ongoing “function[ing]” of life as we know it, even as “no one stopped to ask” if this meaning “was real.”¹⁴ Of concern to this special issue, however, are the Irish writers who have been exploring similar themes over the last number of years.

What this band of literature highlights is a question we might prefer to leave unaddressed: what are we, in this day and age, without our work? How do we live without it, literally in terms of finance, and epistemologically in terms of selfhood, identity and purpose? Moreover, what do we even mean by “work”? What is its significance outside of the self-referential meaning it claims for itself? What contingencies, assumptions, associations do we attach to the concept? Who do we think performs it, and in what context(s)? For Horgan, work, in the broad and literal sense of the word, was fundamentally transformed by the incursion of capitalist thinking with its extractive, accumulative logic. To deliver these ends to the capitalist, people “had to be made into workers.”¹⁵ This involved their incentivisation to involvement in an accumulative process in which they had no stake by a wage in exchange for labour. Though, as Aran Ward Sell points out in his article, “[c]apitalism is not the same as money, and it is not the same as work, and money and work are not the same as each other,” the modes of work with which this special issue engages are part of – whether through participation and complicity in or resistance against – the late capitalist system which defines the contemporary historic moment. Despite inclusions of “The Great Resignation” or “Quiet Quitting,” we live in an age beset, to quote Weeks, by a “depoliticisation of work.” In this world, “quitting” work does nothing to change the processes by which waged work has become, more than the norm, the natural. Here, work is “something that might be tinkered with but never escaped … [the] effort to make work at once public and political is, then, one way to counter the forces that would naturalise, privatise, individualise, ontologise and also, thereby, depoliticise it.”¹⁶

This is the context for Ward Sell’s consideration of the representation of non-remunerative labour in Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times (2020), Caoilinn Hughes’s Orchid and the Wasp (2018) and The Wild Laughter (2020), and Sara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking (2017) and Seven Steeples (2022). Ward Sell suggests that the anti-work sentiment in much contemporary Irish fiction has received three distinct responses: nihilism in the reproduction of working norms, disengagement from work reminiscent of Herman Melville’s Bartleby’s “I’d prefer not to,” and criminality as a way to exist and survive outside of capitalist working norms. Though united and equally eloquent in their disdain for capitalist culture, the characters of these novels choose different options at different times. However, as Ward Sell summarises, “capitalism means that human subjects must be – not just have, but be – a source of money, and this leaves them with two options: get to work, or find a loophole.” Will Fleming’s article continues Ward Sell’s interest in how to represent remunerative work and perform creative work in the context of twenty-first century political economy. He turns his attention to contemporary Irish poets, Ellen Dillon and Catherine Walsh, analysing both in terms of a distinctive political aesthetic in contemporary Irish poetry, and identifying modes of “resistant speech” in their work. For Dillon and Walsh, this poetics of resistance is both gendered and drawn from a history of collective women’s labour in Ireland, especially as pertains to butter churning.

The articles in this special issue are in dialogue with wider conversations about how gender is constructed with regard to work. Allison Phipps has explored the subtle gendering of different modes of production across successive phases of capitalism in what she sees as the current neoliberal and neoconservative age. The growth of tertiary service- and knowledge-based industries of the post-Fordist era was also the origin of the so-called “crisis in masculinity” attending the decline in heavy industrial labour undertaken by the white, male working classes across much of the West.¹⁷ Similarly, in Gendering the Recession, Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker note that the era of national financial prosperity known as the Celtic Tiger was often attributed male characteristics such as virility and “ballsiness,” while the following recession saw markedly more concern for men than women in national media.¹⁸ Indeed, women were often implicitly blamed for the crash through their perceived excess consumerism, itself a form of gendered work, as Dearbhaile Houston argues with reference to Anne Enright’s 2015 novel, The Green Road.¹⁹ Houston explores how the novel captures the quotidian realities and experiences of contemporary Irish gender roles as well as how they are socially and legally constructed – most explicitly in the Irish Constitution’s infamous proclamation about women’s place “in the home.” The Green Road, Houston contends, unpacks and examines how domestic labour functions in relation to individuals and families, and underpins a political and radical edge in Enright’s novel that has often been neglected due to its generic and formal realism.

Domestic labour

Although not always defined as such, domestic labour as a form of work perhaps most associated with women in the Irish context is another vital element of this special issue. That women in Ireland have always worked, within and outside of the home, is something that goes almost without saying. Yet, the topic of work in reference to women can be constrained by narrow definitions and value judgements regarding the nature of work itself. There is a risk in discussing women and work of privileging certain forms of work over others; for example, leading to the misconception that Irish women were totally precluded from economic, remunerative work until the latter half of the twentieth century, ignoring forms of work naturalised as “domestic femininity.” The work of historians such as Mary Daly, Joanna Burke, Caitriona Clear, and Bernadette Whelan, among others, has detailed both the paid and unpaid labour of Irish women.²⁰ Despite this rich history of women’s work, the idea that much of this work, particularly that which was informal and often unremunerated, prevails. It is perhaps the spectre of two twentieth-century legislative events – the aforementioned inclusion of Article 41.2 of Bunreacht na hÉireann, and the “Marriage Bar” (which until 1973 for the public sector and 1977 for the private sector forced married women employed in the Republic to give up their jobs) – that hangs over the popular imaginary of women’s economic, domestic or creative work in Ireland, and leads to this concretising of work into certain forms or spheres. As Heather Laird and Emma Penney note, the lenses of Article 41.2 and marriage bars, in understanding the history of women’s work in Ireland

too often conjure up an image of a frustrated middle-class woman forced to stay at home rather than engage in validating work outside the house. But some women having restricted access to paid labour and the self-fulfilment that it can bring is only one strand of the story of Irish mothers and work outside the home. This story also includes a long history of working-class mothers who had no choice but to join the workforce.²¹

This legislative focus also too easily precludes discussion of women’s work in Northern Ireland, also subject to marriage bars in employment sectors such as teaching until the mid-twentieth century.²²

Regardless of access to economic work, the gendering of domestic labour in Irish culture, north and south of the border, means that women have rarely not been at work in the home. In many ways, Ireland is a case study in the context of 1970s Marxist feminism, which argued that women’s unwaged labour was the unseen foundation of capitalist accumulation. Women, they argued, “not only birthed, clothed and fed male workers, but also soothed their egos, absorbed their frustrations and created homes that offered them some respite from alienated labour.”²³ While the predominant ideology of post-independence Ireland sought to distinguish between the public and private sphere – the world of politics, work, and economy, and the domestic, respectively – along gendered lines, it behoves any critic of Irish culture to resist this false binary.

The mutual entanglement of the paid work of production and the unpaid work of social reproduction performed by women has been theorised by feminist theorists such as Silvia Federici, Pat Mainardi, and Nancy Fraser, among many others. The latter work, such critics have highlighted, is the necessary backdrop of marketised work and capitalist modes of production. Without the nexus of unpaid bearers, carers, and emotional supporters, systems of production as we know it would grind to a halt. This is a hypothesis taken up by Natalie Wall in her examination of the unseen labours performed by women as “war work” in Anna Burns’ 2018 Booker Prize-winning novel, Milkman. For Wall, the breaking of curfews, the “homespun medical corps” operated from family kitchens, and, most importantly, gossip as “guerilla intelligence” are all components of women’s war work which is performed from approved private, domestic spaces. Wall argues that Burns also complicates the boundary between public and private work: when analysed as a type of verbal labour, gossip highlights the movement of the private to the public and back again, as well as highlighting the individual’s role within the community and the community’s impact on the individual. For Wall, women’s concealed labour in Milkman – and the Troubles more broadly – is “key to maintaining paramilitary power” as well as “ensuring their [own] survival.”

Indeed, the false distinctions traditionally wrought between the public world of work and the private domestic sphere underwent alteration over the course of the twentieth century in line with increasing female workplace participation. Per Fraser, this period saw some aspects of social reproduction taken out of the private sphere and transformed into public services. For instance, state-provided or subsidised child care was provided on the understanding that it was to free up female availability for waged work. As we progress in the twenty-first century, Fraser sees this division “mutating again,” with “neoliberalism (re)privatiz[ing] and (re)commodif[ying] some of these services, while also commodifying other aspects of social reproduction for the first time.”²⁴

In Ireland, as elsewhere, such transformation has been palpable. The Celtic Tiger was an era of increased workplace participation for women, largely because the pace of economic growth necessitated the labour of those previously precluded from work. Far from indicating the onset of some feminist utopia, however, this period copper fastened the burden of “the second shift” expected of many Irish women, who were encouraged to put in a good day’s work in the office or elsewhere, followed by a shift of housework, childcare, and emotional management at home. In The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, Catherine Rottenberg reads this expectation as the latest measure of “successful femininity:”

[T]he balanced woman ideal, where women are encouraged to be hands-on “present” mothers as well as professionals, becomes the latest – if unwitting – incarnation of a longer genealogy of ideals, such as the Feminine Mystique and the Beauty Myth, whose ultimate purposes are to keep women down.²⁵

Moreover, as Rottenberg goes on to outline, the rise of neoliberal feminism of the type which emerged during the Celtic Tiger Ireland and continues to this day, often comprises a shifting of the burden of un- or low-paid work to marginalised women, in particular migrants. Ireland has traditionally relied on informal familial arrangements in the provision of care for children, the elderly, the sick and disabled. The emphasis placed on family ties in Irish culture has meant that care work was often provided for by families and communities in the domestic sphere: the elderly were cared for by their offspring, and the children of working women were minded by grandparents or local women who provided inexpensive childcare. However, as more people entered the workforce, retirement ages rose, and care work became a viable and profitable industry, this sort of work is increasingly bought and sold, creating what Fraser calls “a dualized organisation of social reproduction: commodified for those who can pay for it, privatised for those who cannot, with some in the second group performing it for very low wages for those in the first.”²⁶

The sense in which workplace participation did not solve the Irish “gender issue” was made all too obvious upon the event of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, which saw huge renegement on gender equality.²⁷ As Negra and Tasker put it, the crisis discourse of 2008 promoted “the rollback of opportunities for women under the rhetorical cover of necessity,” with austerity figuring as “an overriding priority that nullifies the interests of gender equity.”²⁸ What’s more, women were left to make up the shortfalls in the receding welfare state and were more exposed to cuts in social welfare spending enacted by the austerity budgets from 2010.²⁹

While “The Great Resignation” and “Quiet Quitting” are certainly historically significant trends, there are greater difficulties faced by women in declining the various other types of work with which they are disproportionately saddled. Failing to stay after hours in the office is one thing, but not collecting your child from school is quite another; not attending “optional” work events might be socially acceptable, but not feeding your child is certainly not. Indeed, Bloomberg has recently reported how the demographics experiencing the highest levels of burn-out are women and people of colour, for whom doing the bare minimum at work and at home is politically more fraught.³⁰ In conversation with Orlaith Darling, the writer Caitríona Lally sketches some of the difficulties of balancing these various modes of work. As a cleaner, writer, and parent, Lally speaks to the demands made by each mode of labour, but also to the generative flows which can arise from their intra- and interactions.

The often tacit, unacknowledged complexities of women’s labour in the home and workplace means that changes to capitalism alone are unlikely to bring about truly feminist objectives. As Amia Srinivasan writes, as poorly paid work is increasingly performed by women – especially women of colour – in Ireland and elsewhere, any anti-capitalist movement cannot afford to disregard feminist and anti-racist discourse.³¹ In this issue, Deirdre Flynn explores through a reading of Oona Frawley’s 2014 novel, Flight, how the reliance on a migrant labour force in contemporary Ireland to bridge the care deficit, particularly of the elderly population, is deeply intertwined with racism. Flynn argues that Frawley’s novel explores the “interdependent precarity” between Sandrine, a pregnant woman from Zimbabwe, and the elderly couple, Tom and Clare, for whom she is employed to care. “Sandrine’s labour, non-citizenship and pregnancy,” Flynn notes, “put her in an exceptionally precarious position in the Irish state. The state needs her labour, to care for the ageing Tom and Clare, but will not regularise her employment, or status.” In tracing the connections between the socio-cultural aspects of contemporary Irish citizenry as it has been constructed by the state (and overwhelmingly supported by the voting public) and Frawley’s novel, Flynn offers crucial insight into the under-explored (at least in literary texts) nature of migrant women workers in Ireland. The reliance on the underpaid and under regulated labour of migrant women to address domestic labour as it manifests as a care deficit or the pressures of the second shift as an “outcome of a late capitalist system” is a deeply unsatisfactory solution to the problematic gendering of domestic labour.³²

Beyond these pressing realities of domestic labour reflected in the writing under consideration in this issue, contributors have also engaged with texts that think beyond the binaries of struggle or sentimentality attached to discussions of this aspect of women’s work. In this way, they are in line with a shift in feminist and queer theory which reconsiders the function and import of domestic labour, arguing that this labour and the values it represents cannot be universalised.³³ Certainly, the tasks and practices that constitute domestic labour cannot be wholly separated from their gendered history. They exist, as well, on an affective spectrum from disgust, tedium, enjoyment and many gradients of feeling in between – when it comes to domestic labour one person’s “torture of Sisyphus” is another’s “regime of small kindnesses.”³⁴ There is also the view, as Houston articulates in her discussion of The Green Road, that “[t]he near-invisible nature of domestic labour … is perhaps not the stuff of literary intrigue.” Yet, a recent cluster of works by women writers has begun to place domestic labour to the fore and in doing so, reimagines the many possibilities of this labour’s representation. Primarily, these reconsiderations have emerged in non-fiction: Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living (2018), Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen (2022), and in Irish writing, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (2020). Such writing attempts to recognise creative aspects of domestic labour in of itself as well as in relation to artistic practices, and firmly engages with this work as work.This recognition of the productive rather than negating convergence between domestic labour and creative practice is also at play in this issue through Trish McTighe and Ciara Hickey’s “co-curated” analysis of three performances of “domestic artwork” staged in domestic spaces over the past two decades in Belfast. In this consideration of the intertwining nature of creative and domestic work, McTighe and Hickey, from their perspectives as academic and curator respectively, take as their focus the home as a material site for creative work – the productions considered are ones that have been staged within homes and as a result are imbued with the at-times ambivalent values of hospitality, intimacy, and vulnerability, as well as a problematic gendering. Yet, as McTighe and Hickey articulate, such creative work is significant in centralising the “valorisation of the everyday labour of maintenance that has kept worlds and lives continuing amidst sectarian and gendered violence.” Productions such as Big Telly Theatre Company’s The House (2021) also highlight the simultaneous drudgery and dynamism of domestic labour, speaking to Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art which sought to look beyond the traditional separation of domestic and artistic labour.

The performances examined by McTighe and Hickey are in conversation, then, with a wider turn towards re-evaluating the domestic space and its labour within academic theory and in creative practices from writing to performance. Given the tendency to obscure domestic labour qua labour, either in women’s material lives or on the pages of a book, that domestic labour’s relationship to creative practice – given its full due below – is being made more visible signifies a considerable shift, one which necessarily highlights the entanglement of all forms of labour.

Creative practice

In her 2014 E.F. Schumacher lecture, New York artist Caroline Woolard recounts a 2011 attempt to gain entry to the Museum of Modern Art for free. As Woolard recalls, she treated the ticket seller to a potted history of the various American collectives which lived cash-free existences, and detailed alternative, non-monetary payments she could offer in exchange for a ticket. The ticket seller listened to Woolard before eventually reiterating that she had no power to grant Woolard’s request, that being a ticket seller was just her job, and that the price of admission was still $25.³⁵ Woolard uses this instance as a prompt to consider how the business and commercial logic to which art is now subjected is not actually about exchange, as it professes to be. As she puts it: “To barter, both parties need agency. You can’t be someone working for someone else and engage in a negotiation of the value of your own work because that’s not up to you, it’s just a job.”³⁶

The ways in which artistic production and creative practice have been silently incorporated into a capitalist understanding of “work” is of concern to Woolard. The contemporary era of political economy – which for Woolard is post-Occupy Wall Street – is one that makes “outspoken radicality” almost impossible due to the need to live in an entirely financial world. While previous generations benefited from welfare reforms and societal “new deals” following times of upheaval – which allowed, for instance, the Baby Boomers to attend college for free, or made urban space liveable for artists³⁷ – no such realignment followed the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, which instead signified the doubling down of neoliberal, inequality-producing modes of governance. The ways in which this intensification of financialised logic has impacted creative production are not insignificant. As Woolard outlines, seven out of the ten most expensive colleges in the US after aid and scholarships are art schools. Although there are two million arts graduates in North America, only 200,000 make their primary income from art. 40% of people who do make their income in the arts do not have a degree in the first place even though, as Woolard recounts, it seems to be an unspoken requirement to have an MFA to be considered for prestigious exhibitions and chairs. In other words, art itself is an industry which creates, not works, and not workers, but profit for someone else entirely.

While Phipps and other commentators have more generally contended that the contemporary subject is a “do it yourself” project, both physically and psychically, Woolard notes that contemporary art and the “artist biography” have increasingly become about marketing the self rather than creating work.³⁸ Similarly, Leigh Clare La Berge’s scholarship on the creative industry outlines how artistic practice in the age of “hustle culture” requires that the artist conceive of themself as, not a worker or producer of work, but an entrepreneur in charge of a brand. She asks, then, whether there is a new aesthetic born of this realignment: “How does the artist as entrepreneur offer a chance for a possible critique of the critical theoretical and social forms of our economic moment in a manner similar to the one in which commodity art framed the commodity form?”³⁹ For many scholars of neoliberalism, late, global capitalism has removed the very idea of labour and production from matters of the economy. As La Berge puts it, “nothing is work because everything is capital” which prompts the question of whether there is, then, “also no art.”⁴⁰ In other words, what is the artistic process, what is the artistic work, in this age of entrepreneurialism?⁴¹ To put this slightly differently, as Woolard does, “[w]hat is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees?”⁴² More importantly, can artistic practice disentangle itself from these logics enough to critique the systems in which it exists? The totalising nature of economic work – which under late capitalism absorbs still more areas of life into its relentless logic – has significant implications for creative production and the possibilities of art as critique, creating the imperative that art, as Chiapello and Boltanski put it, “must constantly shift and forge new weapons. It must continually resume its analysis in order to stay as close as possible to the properties that characterise the capitalism of its time.”⁴³

Several Irish women writers have recently turned to this task. Niamh Mulvey takes up Woolard’s question of art, education and privilege, with Hearts and Bones (2022) considering how an artistic life can easily become a bourgeois way of simply passing time, a role stripped of critical or creative capacity. Niamh Campbell’s We Were Young (2021) considers the absorption of previous modes of artistic critique into the mainstream, begetting not artistic resistance but gentrification and political inertia. The protagonist, Cormac, a photographer and art lecturer considers, in one scene, how the purposely ugly aesthetics of art – such as raw concrete and urban decay – meant to expose capitalism’s underbelly is now de rigueur in the more expensive establishments of Dublin. As previously mentioned, Flattery’s absurdist style asks over and over how art is to engage with the un- or sur-reality of capitalism and its practices, with stories such as “Abortion, A Love Story” using metafiction to chart possible modes of resistance, and her debut novel (forthcoming 2023), Nothing Special, following pop artist and subject of much Jamesonian postmodern critique, Andy Warhol and his “Factory.”

Sally Rooney is an author continuously revisiting the idea of work in her fiction. Rooney’s Dublin is one of the most globalised cities in the world, hosting countless European headquarters of some of the dominant players in global capitalism (Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn to name but a few) and epitomising what Microsoft founder Bill Gates dubbed “friction-free” exchange.⁴⁴ Referring to how technological advances in both transport and production have overcome practical and logistical barriers to exchange such as distance and time, “frictionless” trade obscures its reliance on the rampant exploitation of labour. This is an area addressed by Rooney in Conversations with Friends (2017) and Beautiful World, Where Are You (2020). In the former, Frances checks what “the average yearly income would be if the gross world product were divided evenly among everyone, and according to Wikipedia it would be $16,100” and declares that she is “never going to get a job.”⁴⁵ Beautiful World, Where Are You goes further, suggesting the novel’s complicity in the exploitation we read about elsewhere:

The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth […]. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? […] So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world – packing it tightly down beneath the glittering surface of the text […] For this reason I don’t think I’ll ever write a novel again.⁴⁶

In this sense, we might read Rooney’s re-foregrounding of the outsourced friction of “friction-free” existence as part of anticapitalist artistic work. Others, like Sara Baume, Ní Ghríofa, Joanna Walsh, and Claire Louise Bennett meditate on the production of art in contemporary society and how this work might eschew expectations put upon it by capitalist norms, or indeed create glimpses of alternative ways of life.

In this context, we wish to ask what role, then, literature – as both a form and means of representing and reshaping work – might play in “[c]all[ing] into question the tidy narrative of progress around work,” and re-politicising the very idea of “work.”⁴⁷ What are the implications of this effort for different kinds of work beyond waged labour? In her article on the work of reading for this issue, Sophie Corser troubles the distinctions between “lay” and “professional,” or “uncritical” and “critical” reading in Claire Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 and Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat. For Corser, asking the “strange question” of when does reading become work offers new ways to go beyond binaries in categorising work and leisure: “sometimes reading is work, and sometimes reading happens instead of, or in the spaces of time between periods of work.” By unpacking the ways that these texts refuse the imperative to categorise or to definitively state how they are working, Corser makes the case that Bennett and Ní Ghríofa “show the worth and joy of any and all reading – idle, productive, both, neither – and do so without an all-subsuming, single critical purpose.” Corser concludes by commenting on the conditions of reading and writing for academic journals like this one – work often rendered invisible, like much reading in the service of literary research and criticism – and contends that we should be more explicit about the relationship between reading and work in our academic lives, and more emphatic about its worth.

Julie Bates’ article on the artistic practices of Erica Van Horn explores questions of worth and resourcefulness from another angle, that nonetheless resonates with Corser’s claims about the conditions of creative work. Bates examines representations of Ireland in Van Horn’s artist’s books, ephemera, and journals, looking at how they focus on “seemingly banal encounters and daily observations,” unpacking how they “cumulatively document the particular attention she brings to bear on her immediate environment” – explicitly seen in Van Horn’s “Living Locally” series which captures the quotidian experiences of life in Ballybeg in South Tipperary. And yet, locality in Van Horn’s work does not necessarily bestow familiarity, but often explores the strange and alienating experiences of living and working as an outsider or “blow-in.” Van Horn’s practice thereby speaks to another collapse between the distinctions of various forms of work, “opening up a space for thinking about improvisational or frugal creativity as a practical and expressive activity in which not only artists or writers ‘proper’ are engaged.” Van Horn’s work is predicated not on demystifying creative work but capturing its strangeness, a strangeness which Bates suggests we can also see in Bennett’s Pond (2015) and Alice Lyons’ Oona (2020), as texts which both “feature portraits of the confused non-local encountering customs or sayings from which they are excluded,” and working productively from these margins.

In compiling this special issue on women’s work in Irish literature, we are also aware of the various types of work that are not represented here. Areas for further research outside of this issue include sex work, the representation or existence of so-called “Girl Bosses” in Irish literature, as well as involuntary female unemployment. What this special issue does offer, however, is a series of thoughtful and thought-provoking articles on women’s work across a range of media, from drama to poetry to non-fiction to prose.

Having theorised work, we would now like to thank our contributors for theirs and let the work in the following pages speak for itself.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Wilde, “The Remarkable Rocket,” 112.

2. Flattery, “Show Them A Good Time,” 1.

3. See DesRoches et al, “Homeschooling during COVID-19;” Petts et al, “A gendered pandemic;” Hall, “Women doing more homeschooling;” Jemielniak et al, “COVID-19 effect on gender gap;” and Squazzoni et al, “Gender gap in journal submissions.”

4. Weeks, The Problem with Work, 9.

5. Corbyn, “‘Bossware is coming,” npag.

6. Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 169.

7. Wingard, “The Great Resignation,” npag; Parmlee, “Gen Zs and Millennials,” npag; and Alcott, “Gen Z & Millennials,” npag.

8. Wingard, “The Great Resignation,” npag.

9. Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” 358–373.

10. Horgan, Lost in Work, 5.

11. Ibid., 7–8.

12. Ibid., 7–8.

13. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 20.

14. McCarthy, Satin Island, 40; 54.

15. Horgan, Lost in Work, 28.

16. Weeks, The Problem with Work, 4–7.

17. Phipps, The Politics of the Body, 17.

18. Negra and Tasker, “Introduction,” 8.

19. See Connelly, “The Celtic Kittens are in Control.”

20. See Daly, Women and Work in Ireland (1997); Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change, and Housework in Ireland (1993); Clear, Women of the House: Women’s Household Work in Ireland, 1926-61 (2000); and Whelan, Women and Paid Work in Ireland, 1500–1930 (2000).

21. Laird and Penney, “Issues,” n.pag.

22. See O’Leary, “The INTO and the Marriage Bar,” 48. O’Leary notes that while marriage bars were enforced at the discretion of individual dioceses and local authorities in charge of schools, they were widespread.

23. Srinivasan, The Right to Sex, 175.

24. Fraser, “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” 62.

25. Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, 47.

26. Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 169.

27. Murphy, “Gendering the Narrative,” 226; Flynn and Murphy, “Irish Women’s Writing and Culture,” 1–17.

28. Negra and Tasker, “Introduction,” 4.

29. Darling, “Just the way it is,” 207–223.

30. Rieck, “‘Quiet Quitting,’” npag.

31. Srinivasan, The Right to Sex, 176–8.

32. Gillis and Hollows. Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture, 8–9.

33. See Young, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme” (2005); and Castle, “Home Alone” (2006); Fraiman, Extreme Domesticity (2017).

34. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 470; Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books, n.pag.

35. Woolard, “What is a Work of Art,” npag.

36. Ibid., npag.

37. See Smith, Just Kids (2010).

38. Phipps, The Politics of the Body, 38.

39. La Berge, “Wages against Artwork,” 572.

40. Ibid., 579.

41. Ibid., 579.

42. Woolard, “What is a Work of Art,” npag.

43. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 41.

44. KOF Index of Globalisation, npag; Brennan, “Ireland among the easiest places in the world to do business,” npag.

45. Rooney, Conversations with Friends, npag.

46. Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You, 96.

47. Horgan, Lost in Work, 7.