Fruitless Labor
My current research project demonstrates the ways in which 16th-century English writers depicted non-normative forms of labor as in order to ask questions about the atatus of work in a time of great change. I look at texts such as Galatea, Arden of Faversham, The Sheapardes Calender and The Amoretti, all of which depict work that functions outside of work’s usual parameters by characterizing it as failed, impossible, botched, or fruitless. Using these moment as my entry point, I argue that these texts manipulate the terms of labor in order to imagine the boundaries of what work could look like at this time.
This book comes, in part, from a dissertation that was more capacious in its scope. That version of the project, Hardly Working in Premodern English Literature, begins in the mid fourteenth century, when the first bouts of labor legislation were enacted, and traces the engagement with variant forms of labor through the final decades of the sixteenth century, which were characterized by apprenticeship riots and an influx of idle, or unemployed, persons into the city of London. I emphasize variety—temporally, generically (pastoral, romance, epic, eclogue, comedy, tragedy), formally (long and lyric poetry, drama), contextually (courtly poems, patronage poems, popular drama and children’s theater), of authorship (anonymous poets and playwright(s), collaborative authors, canonical writers, and those whose contemporary fame has long since faded)—in order to both demonstrate the thoroughness with which these subverted forms of labor pervaded premodern society and to showcase the multitude of ways in which this manifested.
Other Projects
My article “Botched Labor and Secondhand Craft in Arden of Faversham” recovers the history of the English botchers—clothworkers who mended old clothing—in order to understand the ways in which Arden of Faversham engages botching to stage a tension between repair and destruction in its depiction of Thomas Arden’s murder.
I am currently working on two articles on medeival texts. One tracks the location of labor in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in order to argue about a division of cultural valeus that manifests in divergent treatements of work and workers in the poem. I am also working on an experimental article on the Harley 913 “Lullay Lullay littil child” that asks how our modern understanding of the lullaby genre can illuminate this medieval poem. A version of this article received the Laura Hutchins Heberle Award for Outstanding Critical Writing in 2017.
My second, still nascent, book project builds upon the idea of alternative economies that I lay out in Fruitless Labor and asks how the theoretical apparatuses of Queer Studies can further open up our understanding of the relationships between value, labor, productivity, and exchange. This project was inspired by the ways in which the “fruitless labor” of my first book pushes against a heteronormative understanding of (sexual) activity that is grounded in production, or issue. Just as queer productivity can reshape the way in which we understand the rhetoric of authorial parentage, I postulate, so can queer labor, queer exchange, and queer currency offer new perspectives on understanding literary systems of economy that may not initially read as such under our current paradigms.