Gendering Logistics. Feminist approaches for the Analysis of Supply-Chain Capitalism

Third volume of the series I Quaderni di Into the Black Box.
It is possible to read and download the full text here.
Below the index and the introduction.

Planetary corridors, supply chains, global value chains, hubs, circulation struggles, just-in-time… A logistical lexicon and imaginary are now shaping the very ways in which we think about contemporary capitalism. In the last decade the awareness of the strategic importance of logistics for capital’s reproduction has increased, from the viewpoint of both the managerial techniques of governance and of critical theory and social movements. Logistics is then emerging as a crucial systemic logic, as a set of necessary infrastructures, operations and assemblages of labour force for the reproduction of capital, and as a site of contestation and struggles.

This collection of essays seeks to intervene in the lively discussions about logistical capitalism within and beyond academia, by unearthing the multiple ways in which gender underwrites global circulation. The essays gathered here build on a wide array of feminist and post-colonial works from a range of disciplines, adding to the already existing wealth of analyses that discuss the complex imbrications of processes of gendering and racialization within projects of accumulation on a global scale and across different temporalities. Crucially, we contend that addressing these issues through an explicitly logistical gaze does not amount merely to a reformulation of the insights of these important bodies of work, but rather it is the result of the political urgency to name and counteract the specific mechanisms through which contemporary capitalism shapes our lives and extracts from them.

This e-book thus provides a range of interventions which, however diverse, all place gender at the core of a critical analysis of global flows and mechanisms of extraction. Across these chapters readers will find interrogations of the role of pre-existing taxonomies of gender, often in their articulations to those of race, in sustaining and compounding logistical circulation, as well as examples of the ways in which these are reworked – or even created anew – by the imperative of connectivity. We contend that it is by observing these complex and at times awkward intersections that we can start sketching an opposition to the violence enshrined in the pursuit of seamless flows.

The impressive span of logistics as a series of operations and as a conceptual lens affords novel ways to analyse the multiplicity of phenomena that is enlisted in the reproduction of capitalist worlds and trace connections with spaces once too distant to seem linked. If, as Deborah Cowen has argued, contemporary global capitalism is characterized by a recasting of the relation between making and moving (2014:104), it is also true that these new geometries do not just happen in an “elsewhere” of circulation: they are constitutive of the very fabric of our existences; they intersect with and underwrite the “fleshy, messy, and indeterminate stuff of everyday life” (Katz 2001:711). The week-long blockage of the Suez Canal by a giant container ship, which paralysed maritime traffic in March 2021, is just the latest and one of the most visible examples of such imbrication: the fear of shortages caused by the clogging of such a vital artery of global trade rippled across the globe as corporations, governments and consumers alike lamented the prospected lack of commodities of all kinds, from medical and food supplies to sex toys.  Besides consumption patterns, and in relation to them, as the essays in this collection show the logistical organisation of supply chains has also shaped labour organisation, contributed to further naturalise imaginaries of competition and reproduction, colonised desire, sexuality and relations, making use of and elaborating on gender as a subjectifying force. If logistics quite literally supplies our lives down to an intimate and bodily level, the opposite is also true: our most intimate, bodily efforts are enlisted to sustain the gigantic networks of global trade. Feminist and post-colonial scholars across disciplines have shown how the circulation of capital, commodities and labour is sustained by a host of relations, exchanges and practices traditionally deemed outside the bounds of productive labour (Dalla Costa and James 1975; Hochschild 2012; Bhattacharya 2018). These relational, material practices constitute the basis of social reproduction, functioning as substrates to logistical circulation and allowing its connections to look smooth (Appel 2019:2). As Cindy Katz has argued in calling for analyses that are able to ground what she terms “vagabond capitalism” into the processes that allow it to thrive, “focusing on social reproduction allows us to address questions of the making, maintenance, and exploitation of a fluidly differentiated labor force, the productions (and destructions) of nature, and the means to create alternative geographies of opposition to globalized capitalism” (Katz 2001: 710).

In the first essay of this volume, Irene Peano follows these lines by suggesting that “a gendered study of logistics may take into consideration, first, the role of supply-chain management in shaping (formal and informal, re/productive, waged and unwaged) workers’ subjectivities, movements and relations, including patterns of household organisation, kinship and intimacy […] To overlook such crucial forces would also mean to foreclose the possibility of imagining concrete, viable opposition against them.” (Peano, this volume).

In different ways, all the interventions that follow respond to Peano’s call to shed light on these crucial forces. In particular, most of the studies collected here pause on the making and unmaking of masculinities, showing these processes to be pivotal to the reproduction of logistical timescapes across different settings. As we are shown, crises of masculinity go hand in hand with the changes to labour organisation and the attempted suppression of avenues of struggle at the hands of ever more agile supply chains. As a consequence of these intertwined processes, explored by Kampouri and Rivoal in their texts, we see how virility, docility and respectability are recast through the prism of logistical labour. In parallel to these processes, at the other end of the class hierarchy, as Chua and Gambino show, logistical rationalities as much as libidinal attachments come into existence as the embodied performances of the top managers in charge of governing logistical flows. Exploring the equation between certain kinds of dominant masculinity and the power to calculate future risks crucially exposes the embodied nature of the ostensibly immaterial world of financial calculation. From docks (Kampouri, Rivoal) to boardrooms (Alimahomed-Wilson, Chua), to the private vehicles of logistics-loving Prime Ministers (Gambino), the texts come to terms with the many ways in which what it means to be a [real] man is predicated on the shifting patterns of labour, knowledge and expertise that travel along logistical flows, both existing and imagined. Too often the behaviour of men is left unchallenged by the naturalising operations of the patriarchy. By rendering the familiar strange, a focus on the plurality of processes that converge in the (un)making of masculinity opens up productive avenues to talk about gender as a field of relations that is captured, valued and replicated by capital to ensure unpaid reproductive work and the naturalization of extractive hierarchies more broadly, towards its own reproduction and expansion. To this it must be added that, as Jake Alimahomed-Wilson discusses in his contribution, the sphere of circulation is also a place where race is produced, historically as in the present (see also Zeiderman 2020). The works collected here, therefore, as Evelina Gambino, following Boyer, suggests, may constitute a step in the direction of “confront[ing] and reform[ing] of the transcendence-seeking “hypersubjects” (usually but not exclusively white, straight, northern males) that gifted the world the Anthropocene as part of their centuries-long project of remaking the planet for their own convenience and luxury” (Boyer 2018: 239).

“Any politics that effectively counters capitalism’s global imperative must confront the shifts in social reproduction that have accompanied and enabled it” (Katz 2001:710). (Re)productive processes across supply chains feed off the intersections which define workers’ – and indeed managers’ – subjectivities inside and outside the workplace, creating new productive figurations (Ong 1987; Roediger and Roediger 1999; Rofel 1999).What appears necessary in the face of the complexity of relations and repetitions enlisted to sustain logistical operation is thus, as Anna Tsing has argued, the elaboration of a  “polyglot language of class formation” that those who seek to counteract extractive processes across logistical networks need to articulate (Tsing 2009:175). It is possible to recall some examples in which struggles in the domain of circulation and struggles in the domain of reproduction appear inextricably intertwined – think of the ZAD in France, the No TAV in Val di Susa, the No DAPL movement in Standing Rock or the Tar Sands struggle in Canada. In these contexts, encampments became forms of struggle in themselves, care work presented itself as a barricade and the barricade as care work. If we follow Kristin Ross’ suggestion (2015), these forms of struggle represent today’s embryonic expression of a “Commune form” in which the dimension of needs and desires moves “beyond the measures of capital – beyond wages and price, everything has moved into the sphere of reproduction” (Clover 2020:129).

In “hitting the ground” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019), logistical operations go through different processes of “domestication” (Smith, Rochovská and Stenning 2010). Subjectifying mechanisms that rely on gendering and racialization are pivotal to this domestication: not a mere surplus to the functioning of logistical flows, as the articles collected in this volume show, they permeate the variegated spaces that compose and are engulfed by the pursuit of seamless circulation – from the household to the warehouse and, indeed, the boardrooms where new routes are negotiated. Aiming to detect and sharpen our focus on these processes, this collection assembles situated knowledges on global logistics, that speak from the standpoint of specific bodies, relations, affects and places, naming them as integral to the (re)production of global flows. In the concluding piece of this volume Emilia Weber speaks of one of these struggles and of the horizon that, albeit temporarily, it materialises. “We watch the ship Aurora, named after the Roman goddess who flies across the sky announcing dawn, ferry people in the Baltic, 12 miles off the coast of Poland”. On the ship, feminist sailors provide free and safe abortions to women who are affected by Ireland’s oppressive laws. They do so by using the conventions that regulate seafaring to their own advantage, strategically crossing into international waters. These temporary spaces of maritime gender solidarity, as Weber suggests, resonate with Linebaugh and Rediker’s account of 17^th– and 18^th-century pirates who practiced an “insurgent hydrarchy [..] creating spaces on ships where they governed themselves as limited democracies using the pirate code which included dividing their loot equally, distributing justice and maintaining a multiracial social order, in so doing directly challenging the development of capitalism and international trade” (Weber, this volume).

In her afterword, Deborah Cowen draws on a range of recent decolonial, indigenous and feminist studies to trace some lines of continuity between still budding reflections on the need to gender logistics as a field of inquiry and more established critical engagements with the related domains of mobility, infrastructure, social reproduction in relation to global supply chains. If today’s logistics exists in the wake of the past processes of gender and race subjectivation that have constituted global trade (Cowen 2014; Zeiderman 2020; cf. Sharpe 2016), one of the propositions advanced by this volume is also that logistical struggles exist in the wake of the space-times of insurgent reproduction that have sabotaged capitalist forms of value production in our recent and not-so-recent history.