Work: The Labors of Language, Culture, and History in North America

Like all fundamental categories, work becomes ever more complex as we examine it more closely. The terms 'work,' 'labor,' 'job,' 'employment,' 'occupation,' 'profession,' 'vocation,' 'task,' 'toil,' 'effort,' 'pursuit,' and 'calling' form a dense web of overlapping and contrasting meanings. Moreover, the analysis of work must contend with how histories of class struggle, gendered and sexual divisions of labor, racial hierarchies, and citizenship regimes have determined who counts as a worker and qualifies for the rights, protections, and social respect thereof. And yet waged work is only the tip of an enormous iceberg that feminist theorists call 'socially reproductive labor'-the gendered, mostly unpaid, and hidden work of caring for, feeding, nursing, and teaching the next generation of workers. This collection of essays explores the richness of work as a linguistic, cultural, and historical concept and the conjunctures that are changing work and its worlds.

J. Jesse Ramirez (Ph.D. American Studies, Yale University) is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of St. Gallen. Sixta Quassdorf (PhD English, University of Basel) is a post-doc research assistance at the University of St. Gallen.