It is a well-known fact that the worst victims of the recent exacerbation of the interna- tional division of labor are women. They are the true surplus army of labor in the current conjuncture. In their case, patriarchal social relations contribute to their production as the new focus of super-exploitation (see June Nash and Maria Patricia Fernández-Kelly, eds., Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor). As I have suggested above, to consider the place of sexual reproduction and the family within those social relations should show the pure (or free) "materialist" predication of the subject to be gender-exclusive.
The literary academy emphasizes when necessary that the American tradition at its best is one of individual Adamism and the loosening of frontiers. In terms of political activism within the academy, this free spirit exercises itself at its best by analyzing and calculating predictable strategic effects of specific measures of resistance: boycotting consumer items demonstrating against investments in countries with racist domestic politics, uniting against genocidal foreign policy. Considering the role of telecommunication in entrenching the international division of labor and the oppression of women, this free spirit should subject its unbridled passion for subsidizing computerized information retrieval and theoretical production to the same conscientious scrutiny. The "freeing" of the subject as super-adequation in labor-power entails an absence of extra-economic coercion. Because a positivist vision can only recognize the latter, that is to say, domination, within post-industrial cultures like the U.S., telecommunication seems to bring nothing but the promise of infinite liberty for the subject. Economic coercion as exploitation is hidden from sight in "the rest of the world."
"Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak