Joy certainly seems to be cropping up a lot of places recently, it must be the new talking point of the left.

I guess they realized they can't sell (ha) struggle to the unwashed masses, they have to tell them that the subservience and privation they experience under communism is actually joy and they should be grateful.

Excerpt from intelligent reviewer:

This series of collected essays (with one coauthored by George Caffentzis) by Federici stems from a series of lectures she gave on the meaning of the body--specifically focused on women's bodies, but not exclusively-- and capitalist body politics in general through the 16th through 21st centuries. Some essays are trained on discrete technological innovations (such as surrogacy) that point to the reduction of women to reproductive vessels, where not only their bodies but their children become commodities, in extreme manifestations of class hierarchies. Most essays though are focused on three themes or threads.

The first thread includes Caliban-reminiscent explorations of how women's bodies, sexual and intellectual expression, and reproductive function have been the subject of often violent repression in the service of accumulation and economic imperatives for recreating the labor force.

A second thread is her trenchant critique of Judith Butler, deconstructionists, and others concerned with gender as happening purely at the level of performance or discourse. She beautifully argues the acknowledgment of millions of years of evolution, of our rootedness in the body, and how women as biological beings must continue to constitute a political subject not only because of our history, but continued shared realities demanding political consciousness of women as a 'class.'

A third thread is more related to work in Revolution at Point Zero, more of a direct conversation about women's sexual pleasure as workers and partners. She explores how within the context of both the imperatives of the economic system's changes and within the context of psychology/psychoanalysis--it is an object of pathologizing, transformation into duty and work as such, and ultimately, made subservient, contained, joyless.

I particularly liked her last two essays about joy and the body, which takes to task her fellow leftists for the misery and self-sacrifice they demand of others and selves, rather than emphasizing the possibilities of the collective from the point of shared understanding and happiness, the possibilities of the body, the joy of the struggle.

Overall an accessible introduction to some of the themes she explores more at length in her earlier work.

How is this not ovarit's manifesto and required reading by now?

I've read this book, and can vouch that it's worth reading.

Fantastic. An essay of hers literally changed my life.

On my list now, thank you!

Will definitively read.