Import/ Export: Housework in an international frame

THIS ESSAY IS AN INVITATION TO REVISIT THE SECOND- WAVE FEMI- nist debate on housework. It seems appropriate that a special issue on work should touch on one of the most dreaded forms of labor: housework. Traditionally done by women under the aus- pices of the family, this work has been outsourced over the last two decades to women from outside the family and often from outside the nation. I intend to rethink housework in an international frame and to consider its affinities with other forms of labor engendered by late capitalism. My focus is contemporary western Europe, where eastern European women, alongside women from the global South, do a lot of the physical household work and the caring labor tradi- tionally associated with the role of a housewife. Ulrich Seidl's film Import Export (2007) dramatizes this predicament and serves as my entry into the housework debate. The film exposes viewers to the embodied knowledge of nonprofessional actors, who lend docu- mentary immediacy to fictional scenes, characters, and dialogues. A close reading of the film expands our understanding of the con- temporary, transnational continuum of "women's work," pointing to the post- 1989 emergence of an international private sphere. Argu- ments about foreign language learning and translation are central to the film's project and to the conclusion of this essay, as is the use of visual gesture in a context in which language often fails or feels inadequate. I will take a brief excursion through Seidl's film before I turn to the second- wave feminist debate on housework and identify its points of convergence with autonomist neo- Marxism, one of the most influential theories of post- Fordist labor.