MSA 2025 Proposed Panel: Infrastructures of Hidden Labor

Towards the end of ‘Time Passes,’ as Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast prepare the house for the Ramsays’ return, Woolf pens a striking scene of rebirth and renewal: “[S]ome rusty laborious birth seemed to be taking place, as the women, stooping, rising, groaning, singing, slapped and slammed, upstairs now, now down in the cellars. Oh, they said, the work!” Through this imagery, Woolf not only acknowledges the often-overlooked services of domestic workers but also highlights the essential forms of (reproductive) labor that sustain both the household and broader social structures. In keeping with the 2025 MSA Conference theme, this panel seeks to explore the implications of hidden labor in and of modernism—forms of work that capital refuses to valorize but, nonetheless, relies upon for the reproduction of society. Drawing on Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and other theories of labor, we seek papers that examine how modernism engages with domestic, reproductive, and affective labor, particularly in relation to shifting class dynamics, gendered labor, and politics of effacement. Possible topics might include, but are not limited to: 

–Social reproduction and gendered labor in modernism.

–Intersections of race, coloniality, and hidden labor in modernist texts.

–Aesthetics of non-labor: modernist form, fragmentation, and reproductive work.

–Invisible labor of care and maintenance in modernist narratives.

–Capitalism, leisure, and the erasure of working-class labor in modernist works.

–Labor, automation, and anxieties about mechanization.

–Division of labor in modernist artistic and literary circles.

–Invisible middlewomen of modernism.

–Amateurs versus Experts: politics of visible/invisible labor.  

Please send proposals of 200–250 words, along with a brief bio note (2–3 sentences), to Anwita Ghosh at aghosh6@fordham.edu by March 30th, 2025.