Get Your Smart On
Kathi Weeks shines a light on our modern work woes, running an analogy between work and marriage. In this piece, I present the carrot and the stick of it, subjugation and subjectification.
In previous parts of this series, we saw how work is depoliticized by being relegated to the private realm of individual choice. Working to re-politicize work, much like feminists politicized the family and marriage, gives us some purchase on work as well. We begin to see the subjugation and domination in work arrangements, situations that we have come to accept as given.
We continue that discussion in this part. We’ll look at the “stick” of subjugation/domination, and the “carrots” as well. It is costly and difficult to maintain order through force, and much more effective to convince us that it was our idea to begin with, and that we enjoy it. Many of us find satisfaction and pleasure in our work roles, as in our gender roles. It can feel like empowerment.
“...at the same time, as Michael Denning reminds us, ‘the workplace remains the fundamental unfree association of civil society’ .” (Weeks 23)
We may live in a representative democracy in the United States, but we submit to authoritarianism at work. As Weeks underscores, most people experience hierarchical power relations in their daily lives at work. You may not know this (I didn’t), but the corporate workplace is modeled on military command and control structures, featuring hierarchical chains of command with strict top-down power and reporting structures, mission statements, strategic objectives, etc. The assumption is that efficiency in production requires battlefield level precision. There must be separation where someone gives orders, others execute them, and questioning the chain of command is insubordination. This isn’t metaphorical: business schools teach military strategy, and management theory draws heavily from military doctrines of command and control. So if you feel like you are going to war when going to work, now you know.
But it gets even more interesting, because where did corporate management get their ideas about how they should organize themselves? As Daniella Mestyanek Young (a.k.a., knitting cult lady), a “scholar of cults, extreme groups, and extremely bad leadership” reminds us, modern corporations turned to cults in organizing the modern workplace.1 In the 1970’s, they began to incorporate psychological manipulation techniques borrowed from the human potential movement, EST (Erhard Seminars Training), and Scientology management technology was marketed specifically to businesses. We have been primed for minimal subsistence in high-control organizations. Therefore, the US-American workplace shares some key characteristics with traditional cults, and that is no fun.
We live in a society that idealizes freedom, democracy and individualism, but we spend most of our waking hours in spaces that are anti-democratic, that rob us of most of our autonomy, and are designed to make us feel small. These spaces objectify us by putting us into roles that are cut out for us from their needs. The employment contract maintains the capitalist as “master” with the political right to determine how workers’ talents and time will be used. This seems obvious and we think this is just how things are. What is often missed by the bosses is that this affects the quality of work that is done, and not only the dignity and humanity of the worker. Since industrialization, workers have been viewed as cogs in the industrialist machine, and utterly replaceable. Heck, I have been told I’m replaceable to my face.
It was the director of an independent art school who hired me to teach a couple art theory courses. I rationalized that someone probably said that to her, the founder-director, and it’s probably a part of why she turned away from traditional art schools and started her own experimental school. An amazing project and it was so much fun, a dream come true for me, but hearing that, even if it was mostly in “jest,” was a bit of a shocker.
No doubt, this is at the top of my list for why work sucks. Still, it is surprising that this contradiction doesn’t create more cognitive dissonance and push back. Why not?
“…working is the only way that most of us can meet our basic needs.” (Weeks, p.7)
Our survival often depends on us performing our job roles well. In this sense, worker and wife are analogous roles, we have been compelled to take up either one or both of these roles. That is a lot of pressure pushing back against common sense and the discomforts of dissonance. We want to be free, but also we want to stay alive.
In Hegel’s Master/Slave dialectic, the slave is the consciousness that decides freedom without life is useless. We don’t want to think of ourselves as slaves. It is easier to enslave us than to convince us that we have been subjugated and dominated in this most important area of our lives.
“That individuals should work is fundamental to the basic social contract; indeed, working is part of what is supposed to transform subjects into the independent individuals of the liberal imaginary, and for that reason, is treated as a basic obligation of citizenship” (Weeks, 8).
What makes these systems so effective is not subjugation and domination as much as the carrot: the pleasures of subjectification. Subjectification refers to the process by which individuals are shaped into particular types of subjects — that is, how people come to understand themselves and their identities in relation to systems of power and social structures. Weeks points out that: “Work produces not just economic goods and services but also social and political subjects. In other words, the wage relation generates not just income and capital, but disciplined individuals, governable subjects, worthy citizens, and responsible family members” (Weeks, 8). Like our magician in the previous piece in this series, the same act by which a lazy worker is produced, a worthy worker is produced as the obedient, productive, overachiever. In the process, workers are pitted against each other.
I vividly remember a scene from my first job at a bookstore in downtown San Francisco, where I was so eager to please and be a good employee, that it had to be pointed out to me that I was making everyone else look bad. Of course, I took it as a compliment then, but now I recognize that you can’t accept the good part, the carrot, without becoming complicit in what the stick does.
The process of becoming “classed” isn’t just imposed from above. It’s something we take on, like a life project. Weeks observes that “this process of subjectification is perhaps best understood in terms of a model not of passive construction but of active recruitment. Often it’s less a matter of command and obedience than one of inducement and attraction” (Weeks, 9). We’re not just forced into work roles; we’re seduced by them. Along these lines, she notes that “some of the attractions of different forms of work are about joining a relatively advantaged class: becoming a member of the working class rather than the underclass, a middle-class rather than a working-class person, a salaried versus an hourly worker, a professional with a career as opposed to a working stiff and job holder” (Weeks, 9).
These distinctions matter to us, deeply. They shape how we see ourselves and how others see us. They determine our social recognition, our sense of worth, our very identity. The satisfaction we feel when we do our jobs well, the pride we take in our professional identity, the pleasure of being recognized as competent, worthy citizens, respectable—all of this is real. The feelings are genuine. But they’re also precisely what makes the system work so effectively, the carrot of subjectification that accompanies the stick of subjugation.
Weeks’ analogy is really on point here: Work is also a site for the production of gender (and vice-versa). “Gender is put to work when, for example, workers draw upon gender codes and scripts as a way to negotiate relationships with bosses and co-workers, to personalize interactions, or to communicate courtesy, care, professionalism, or authority to clients, students, patients, or customers” (Weeks, 9). Not only has work been organized along gender lines—if I say nurses and plumbers, you are not confused about the gender implied in these roles—but work can be seen as an expression of one’s gender, or as a rebellion against it.
Anecdotally, I can now recognize that becoming a philosopher has been, for me, a way to appropriate a masculine rationality, and a European way of thinking, denied to me by my assigned at birth sex and ethnic background. Joke is on me though because the roots of philosophy lies with the Diotimas and Sapphos of the ancient world. Becoming philosopher has meant reclaiming these origins for myself, against my training. But I had to learn to take a little less pleasure, and to be suspicious of the pleasures of performing “feminist philosopher.”
We draw on these gendered codes often without thinking about it, scripting how we interact with colleagues, clients, bosses. I once had a male colleague in tech that was speaking to me in a very paternalistic way, even though we were on the same level professionally. I began making notes of the things he said, word for word, and then when the occasion presented itself, I parroted these words back to him exactly. The reaction was immediate. He felt disrespected and stopped the interaction to give me a look. I just continued as if nothing, but I knew right then that I wasn’t wrong in my assessment. I need not have doubted myself, but I was suffering from that double ontological shock described by Sandra Bartky (I wrote about it in Becoming-Feminist). There are more and less acceptable ways to perform one’s gender. If the carrot doesn’t work, then you get to see the stick.
Work roles and gender roles can align, or fail to align, in ways that reinforce assumptions or create dissonance. Doing men’s work, doing women’s work, but also doing or performing masculinity and femininity in ways that can make us more or less visible, attractive, likable, acceptable, and even recognizable as human. In what is my favorite quote from the introduction, Weeks observes, “sometimes doing gender might be treated as part of doing the job; at other times doing the job is part of what it means to do gender” (Weeks, 10). We don’t just do our gender; we become what it means for us to be our genders, and we do this at work. In the US-American context, work and identity are very closely bound up. This is why the question “What do you do?” at a party really means “Who are you?” Your job isn’t just how you earn money; it’s who you are as a person.
Each of us is a node that repeats a pattern that makes that pattern stronger, with the exceptions proving the rule. This is what Weeks means when she cites Michael Burawoy’s well known point: “Exploitable subjects are not just found, they are… made at the point of production” (Weeks, 10, my italics). We are shaped into workers who will accept domination because we find meaning, satisfaction, and identity through that very domination. We become invested in our own exploitation because it makes us who we are in the social and political sense. This is something that I first learned about from Simone deBeauvoir’s The Second Sex. I think being a feminist woman helps in seeing how work works, in this extra-economic role.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean the pleasure is fake or that we’re duped. It means the system is more sophisticated than simple coercion. We are offered real rewards — social recognition, class mobility, identity, community — in exchange for our submission. For some, the submission is only for certain hours, you’re supposed to get your freedom back after hours, on the weekends, while at home where you might get to play to boss-role. For many of us, especially those who’ve been historically excluded from some forms of recognition, the trade can feel worth it. Being recognized as a professional, as middle class, as respectable, these aren’t nothing. It feels good to be a somebody. Acquiescing is in some cases a survival strategy, a forms of resistance against other systems of domination: for example, becoming a feminist philosopher as a bulwark against misogyny.
But the costs can be as high as one’s spirit, and Weeks wants us to see the true risk of the work contract in its current forms. When our sense of self is so deeply bound up with work, we become vulnerable in new ways. Losing a job isn’t just losing income; it’s losing who you are. Challenging workplace injustice isn’t just risking your paycheck and healthcare; it’s risking your identity and social standing, your human dignity. Imagining a world with less work or different work is more difficult when work is so central to our sense of meaning and worth.
There is one more section, on how work and marriage are intertwined systems. Out next Tuesday. This all may take a utopian turn, we shall see. In the meantime, if you did not know it, a colleague and I have started the Work Matters Substack dedicated to women reinventing themselves in midlife through work that connects to others. It’s the practical arm of the ideas I’ve been batting about here. Check us out!
deBeauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Books, 2011.
Beecher, Catherine Esther. A Treatise on Domestic Economy. 1841. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21829/21829-h/21829-h.htm. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
National Women’s History Museum. “Coverture: The Word You Probably Don’t Know But Should.” Women’s History Museum, www.womenshistory.org/articles/coverture-word-you-probably-dont-know-should. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
“Lowell Mill Girls and the Factory System, 1840.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/lowell-mill-girls-and-factory-system-1840. Accessed 23 Sept. 2025.
Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection Of Women was published 1869 but written earlier 1860-1861 after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill in 1858. Harriet Taylor Mill’s contribution to “The Subjection of Women” was substantial, though the exact extent remains debated by scholars. Mill himself credited her extensively in his autobiography, stating that the book was “more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name.”
“Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, 1848.” Internet Modern History Sourcebook, Fordham University, sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/senecafalls.asp. Accessed 29 Sept. 2025.
Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press, 2011.